Faraj Suleiman

MARSM is proud to present leading Palestinian jazz pianist and composer Faraj Suleiman’s return to the EFG London Jazz Festival, on the back of his new album As Much As It Takes.

Faraj Suleiman’s path has been fraught with obstacles: when you’re born in 1984 in a Palestinian village, a career as a pianist is not a straightforward journey. And even if his name’s now known to European music lovers, he struggled during the pandemic—stuck in Paris even though he lives in Haifa—to get his new album out there. That’s the meaning of its title, As Much As It Takes. Whatever it takes, Suleiman composes and records to add to his already copious discography, because music overwhelms him. It’s the expression of his joys and sorrows, his anger too. It’s instrumental and narrative: it’s intimate, universal and political. Any work produced by a Palestinian is, according to the pianist, intrinsically political.

As Much As It Takes tells his story, from a youth torn between piano lessons and playing football with his mates, to the Montreux Jazz Festival, where he lived out his artist’s dream. Alongside his albums of songs, including Upright Biano in 2023, the prolific composer has created an instrumental project whose eleven tracks trace the stages of his dizzying career: Rama Village echoes his childhood, Akka-Safad is named after the road that crosses the Galilean landscape, Dal’ouna In The Galilean Wedding evokes the wedding music his father intended him to play, and so on.

Faraj Suleiman’s music is instrumental, but it tells us stories—his own, but also those of all the Palestinians buffeted by the winds of conflict, and of us all.