There are two scents that musician vividly remembers from his childhood; in his family kitchen in the northern Palestinian city of Nazareth where he was born in 1973, Samir’s mother prepares tabbouleh, while his father carves wood nearby.
Hailing from a musical family, Samir is a descendant of generations of oud makers, and it is this majestic stringed instrument from the Arab world that would come to define his career.
Picking it up at the age of five, the oud has been his constant companion through thick and thin. "It's a part of my body, it's a part of my life," he tells °®Âţµş.
The virtuoso from Palestine is the founder and member of , one of the most talked about and successful musical acts to come out of the Middle East and gain international acclaim, formed in 2003 with his younger brothers Wissam and Adnan Joubran.
You may have heard the trio’s stirring and beloved tunes playing in the background of Instagram reels related to Palestine.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Le Trio Joubran travelled to all four corners of the world, performing between 80 and 120 concerts a year.
Samir is on a high, having just completed one of the trio's last shows of 2024 in the Emirati city of Sharjah in December.
The three brothers have also just been granted the prestigious title of Officer of the French Legion d'Honneur civilian . This was preceded by a major concert at the Philharmonie de Paris in November 2024, where tickets were sold out in August. Samir claimed that 3,000 people attended the event, where the trio gave encore performances four times.
A musical trinity
It was in Paris, where Samir is partially based (as well as in Ramallah), that the trio's story began professionally. The eldest brother embarked on a solo career, later joined by Wissam as a duo act, and finally, Adnan came into the picture, forming a musical trinity.
An idea clicked in Samir's mind: Three brothers with three ouds, which was a phenomenon at the time. “The architectural shape of the triangle is very strong as an energy. The most important shape that moves in the world is the triangle,” he explained the symbolism behind the group's French name.
There were some challenges that Samir and the trio dealt with in the early days (while releasing the trio's first albums and ), particularly their image. Producers and marketers wanted something traditional, but Samir was in a whole other mindset of modernising Arabic music and how it was being perceived. “They tried to make the album cover oriental, where I am sitting on a camel," recalled Samir.
Instead, the popular Majaz album cover featured the three brothers walking barefoot on the beach. “It was a shock for the producer and a successful cover,” said Samir. “I always worried that they would confine me to folkloric music, which I always had to fight.”
The trio modernises oud music by drafting their compositions – sometimes rousing, sometimes melancholic – which in itself is a complicated process.
“There are no formalities between my brothers and I. We might disagree on a sentence, we fight, throw away our ouds, and leave each other for a month, but then we get back together. It’s not easy," he said. “These are our melodies and we built our audiences with our melodies.”
Today, Le Trio Joubran is enjoyed by everyone: Arabs, foreigners, the young and the old. “It’s about how you compose music that carries the old generation forward and connects it with the new generation. That has been the 20-year journey of Le Trio Joubran.”
The poetic influence
Time with Samir passes by quickly even during an interview that lasted for nearly two hours. He is like a modern-day hakawati, recounting with ease entertaining and touching stories of chance encounters and personal memories. Like the time he happened to be sitting across from the Lebanese legend Fairuz in an airport in Canada, or the time that Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, reached out to him by phone to artistically collaborate.
One time, the trio performed a marathon concert for 12 hours straight for a breast cancer fundraising event in Palestine, causing Samir to collapse.
However, he says that his best concert happened recently with just his parents while they were preparing a meal. He took out his oud to play and sing with them.
And then, there was Mahmoud Darwish, the national poet of Palestine and Samir’s biggest influence. "He taught me a lot of things. I was with him for 13 years," he said.
"We could sit here for two weeks talking about him."
Samir met the poet in France in 1996, where they gave an unplanned performance that lyrically blended his poetry recital and Samir's oud playing.
The duo ended up collaborating until the poet's death in 2008, presenting 34 soirées of poetry and music together around the world.
“When he died, he took my soul with him,” said Samir. Needless to say, they became close. “He once told me that what he liked about me was that we could be sitting together in silence for 10 minutes in a restaurant, for example, and there's no pressure for him to speak: 'I am comfortable in my silence.'"
To this day, all of their concerts feature powerful playbacks of Mahmoud Darwish’s firm voice reciting his verses. “We have on this land all of that which makes life worth living,” the poet famously said of his homeland.
A musician from Palestine
On the oud itself, which Samir describes as the oldest instrument in the world (acting as a father to the guitar and mandolin), it is a deep and emotional organ, held with care on one’s lap.
Samir admits that he feels "naked" without it as if it’s armour. There is something about its close contact with the human body that makes playing it a transformative experience.
“The oud is the closest instrument to the performer’s body," he explained. "When you play the piano, it’s far from you. When you hold a violin, it’s close to your head. But with the oud, the vibrations that emerge from the strings touch your heart. I feel it in my gut. As a listener, you might be hearing a sound, but as a performer, I feel it."
Samir is also aware of the social responsibility that comes with his profession. He loathes being called a "Palestinian musician" (a "musician from Palestine" sounds better to him) since he believes that his identity overshadows his art.
“I worry that people clap for me because I am a hero or a victim because I’m a Palestinian. I’m not a hero or a victim. I just want to be a normal human being who defends his rights against the [Israeli] occupation and injustice. I want to defend my daughters' rights to live a better future," he passionately said.
With the ongoing tragedy in Gaza, as well as Israel’s continued appropriation of Palestinian culture, Samir, Wissam, and Adnan are more committed to their art than ever before.
"We have a national responsibility, bigger than our family, business, and everything else. It’s no longer about us. We are carrying a message: We are going through a difficult period, and our message is to preserve what’s left of our humanity.”
Rawaa Talass is a freelance journalist focusing on art and culture emerging from the Middle East. Her work has been published in Art Dubai, Arab News, Al Arabiya English, Artsy, The Art Newspaper, Kayhan Life, Dubai Collection, and The National
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