A restless artist, Abdullah Miniawy is far from complacent about the status he has acquired over the last decade. He has had albums praised by renowned institutions (NPR, Pitchfork, Wire, Quietus, etc.), a career in cinema (Alaeddine Slim’s Tlamess, which attracted attention), and recognition by the European Parliament as an agent of change living in the Schengen area. That matters little. What matters is the present.
In recent years, the present has been shaped by a trio, with trombonists Robinson Khoury and Jules Boittin, a collaboration that has taken the Egyptian composer, writer, and singer’s sonic perspective to new heights. The result is presented in Peacock Dreams, released in 2025, where jazz merges with drone, ideas of soundscapes are overturned by epic constructions of noise built on the mirage of concrete music and field recordings.
Western diplomatic will likes to look at this music as a bridge between West and East, as if an artist’s will only existed in merging, creating bridges, existing in modernity in this eternal balance of history that has the West as its pillar. Abdullah Miniawy leaps over this need to bring people together, obliterates tradition, and creates his own stage.
The strangeness—without exoticism—of Miniawy’s music exists because it tastes new, because the landscapes he constructs with Khoury and Boittin go beyond the boundaries with which we look at music. For example, what if this were not traditional, but just new? Because it is new. In Peacock Dreams, the three artists did not create music for acceptance, but a brave new world, without West or East, only what is. Miniawy’s voice rises above the noise, whether from the gray and indestructible landscapes that the trombonists construct, or from that paternalistic voice that makes us always look at this music as a consequence of something else. It is not. It is a force in its own right.
AS