Toufic Farroukh

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Toufic Farroukh (Arabic: توفيق فرّوخ) is a Lebanese Jazz composer.

[edit] Overview

Toufic Farroukh is a saxophone player and composer of jazz with a middle-eastern flavour stemming from his bi-cultural roots in Lebanon and France.

His brother was a saxophone player and he’s the one who guided him to this instrument and taught him its ABCs. He was an amateur who instilled in Toufic the love of professionalism. They had discovered the saxophone in the Boy Scouts. The instrument was strange to their environment; unconventional, and used only for certain occasions.

A good friend, Issam Hage Ali, and Toufic did pretty good work on this instrument and through it, the bond of their friendship strengthened and they became more like brothers. Music was their solace during the bloody events. It was a real flight from the horrors of the time.

When he moved from Beirut to Paris , where he studied music in the conservatory and in the Advanced College of Music, saxophone was his first goal. His familiarity with it emerged through modern music, particularly the alto saxophone. As for the modern classical music, except Ravel and the French composer Claude Debussy, who introduced the saxophone in some of their rare works, this instrument was not used by classical musical orchestras. When we say modern music, he presuppose the music that was written in the 20th century for a saxophone and orchestra or saxophone and piano. After the 1950s, writing for the saxophone increased significantly.

In fact, he did not study jazz and its roots at all, nor played jazz on the saxophone. Despite what he learned from the musical institutions in Paris , he is still a self-made musician, who learned and composes by himself. He went searching with this instrument and found that the love he has for it brings out dormant obsessions in him. None of the other musicians were able help him express them as he wished. Since then, he started writing my music.