Camac Blog
“An ode to joy and nostalgia”: Harkan at the Espace Camac
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May 12, 2025
Harkan is a trio led by renowned French harpist Maïa Darmé, featuring Tunisian kanun player Mohamed-Amine Kalaï and Iranian Kurdish percussionist Ebrahim Ahmadi (daf, dayereh, and bendir). Harkan blends sensuous compositions with exhilarating dances and balances the musical influences of East and West. On Saturday, 17 May at 8 pm, they invite the audience of Espace Camac on an enchanting journey to distant lands. We asked Maïa how it all began.
“I met Mohamed-Amine in 2016, backstage at the Théâtre de Tunis. We crossed paths as he left the stage, and I was about to go on. I had come to play Boieldieu’s concerto with the Tunisian Symphony Orchestra, and he had just performed Vivaldi’s mandolin concerto on the kanun. I found the transcription very interesting, and we exchanged contact details.
The idea of playing together slowly matured over two years: I returned regularly to Tunisia for concerts, and each time, we took the opportunity to jam, think about the best repertoire, try out pieces, and, on my side, get to know the kanun better so that I could make arrangements that would showcase its strengths.”
Despite the logistical constraints such a collaboration would entail (distance, visas, schedules, and the fact that there was only one pedal harp in Tunisia, etc.), Harkan was launched in the summer of 2018 with a tour of the Maghreb. In addition to concerts as a duo, they quickly started playing with several other musicians, performing as a trio with different percussionists, using traditional percussion.
“Ebrahim, an Iranian Kurdish daf player, joined us in 2022. We were looking for a percussionist for concerts in France, and we discovered him and contacted him on Facebook! Since then, we’ve been focusing on this trio format with percussion, which we really enjoy.”
They describe themselves as being ‘at the crossroads of jazz, classical (both Western and Eastern) and world music’, but in reality they cover a rich repertoire that incorporates traditional melodies from Spanish-Andalusian, Turkish, North African, Levantine, and Greek cultures, as well as discovering the Kurdish repertoire with Ebrahim. For Maïa, however, this is part of what keeps the experience of being a musician fresh:
I need variety in the genres I play on the harp to feel stimulated. I love discovering styles and instruments I didn’t know before. Ultimately, what interested us was discovering each other’s musical culture rather than playing in our ‘native language’.
Harkan is very happy to be playing in France in the coming months, where they will record their first album at the end of June. After having to postpone it a few times, the recording represents a joyous moment of arrival.
Reflecting on this brought forth a flood of happy anecdotes regarding their adventures while playing in North Africa and the Middle East:
“Sometimes, every little aspect of the organisation has been a battle. For a festival in 2019, for example, the harp was to be provided by the Ministry of Culture. All the contracts had been signed and stamped in due form beforehand. But two hours before the start of our concert, we still didn’t have a harp: the people responsible for transport were not allowed to remove the instrument from where it was stored. It took a call from the French Ambassador to the Minister of Culture to resolve the situation. All for a harp… (which arrived a few minutes before we went on stage with several strings missing!)”
We are quite sure this won’t be necessary, when they visit us at the Espace Camac!
For their concert, the performers will present a programme titled ‘Happy Days’, which Maïa describes as an “ode to joy and nostalgia” reflecting all the diverse musical cultures of the Mediterranean. The programme captures both the joy of the present, along with more wistful elements, that evoke this intersection of East and West.
We warmly invite you to reserve your tickets here and we look forward to seeing you there!
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