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 Guy
Manoukian
Complementary
Beats
by Creative
Lives - Order the book
One night in July 2007, Guy Manoukian's mobile rang. For a year
since he'd first met Wyclef Jean, the Hatian-American rapper, hip
hopper, and producer, Guy had been trying without success to reach
him on the phone. Now Wyclef was calling him.
“Shaki loved the song!” Wyclef told Guy. Even more enticing to Guy's
ears, he said: “She wants to meet you.” Guy had only just arrived
in Beirut after a series of recording sessions in New York City.
Within hours, he flew back.
He met Wyclef and Shakira, the Colombian pop star of Lebanese descent,
at Platinum Sound Recording Studios, and clicked play. On hearing
the beat, Shakira stood up and began to dance.
Not wanting to expose the crazed fan within, Guy tried to look nonchalant…
while taking photos with his cell phone to show his wife. “I was
like, ‘Oh my God, she's dancing to my music! And for me!’ Khalas,
I could have retired.”
Early retirement, however, seems unlikely for a composer-performer
who has ongoing projects in so many countries that he lacks a weekend
and, sometimes, a time zone. During an average week, Lebanon calls
him on Friday, Dubai on Sunday, and New York often wakes him in
the middle of the night. Whether he's working on his own new album,
collaborating with another artist, or composing an advertisement's
score, Guy often spends nights on his recording studio's couch in
Zalka.
That's not to mention the lesser known sales and development hardhat
that he wears as a partner in the family construction business.
Under his father's oversight, Guy and his two older brothers (a
banker and a civil engineer) have put together and sold four residential
buildings, and five more are in the planning stages.
Guy insists that composition and construction complement each other
- for one, he has only to walk a few feet away from his recording
space to find himself among family and building plans.
“I never feel that there are two separate things,” he says. “I always
find my music in what we're building, and I always find the structure
in everything that we're building in my music.”
In the same way, he says, normal, daily life inspires his compositions.
Like the basketball star he once was, Guy believes you must keep
your feet planted firmly on the court if you want to make that next
jump shot.
On stage and off, he favors an unpretentious look, pairing dark
pants and blazers with white shirts made after-party casual by an
upturned or unbuttoned collar. It's the bad-boy-turned-good-boy-who-still-wants-to-come-across-as-a-little-bad
look. (It's an act, sure, but no more than any other fashion statement.)
This eyebrow-raising, head-turning mixture also describes the music
that, in 2001, finally made the major record labels take notice
– a fusion of Mediterranean instrumental sounds with dance beats.
More specifically: “Arabic fused with Armenian with Kurdish with
Assyrian with Chaldean with Greek.”
Guy has always been ambitious, but his story starts simply, nearly
a decade earlier, with a feasibility study and a family connection.
In 1992, Guy needed $6,000 to finish his first album and seal the
deal with an interested production company, Clic France.
Then a tall, lanky 16-year-old, obviously a high school student
in a suit, Guy had no employment and no income, but he already had
the beginnings of an impressive résumé - a television
debut at age six, the occasional gig entertaining visiting foreign
dignitaries at Baabda Palace- and a business-savvy family.
Guy's father set up an appointment for him an acquaintance, Habib
Abou Fadel, then the CEO of Allied Bank, and gave him a painting
to put up as collateral. His older brothers had put together a feasibility
study for him.
This early collaboration paid off: Abou Fadel approved Guy's loan
and became his patron, helping him to develop a reputation in Lebanon
as a performing artist and contributing funding to several popular
concerts. “People in Lebanon thought I was a foreigner,” Guy says,
explaining that he is Lebanese of Armenian origin. “So that helped
me a lot.”
Guy's first two albums, Angham (1997) and The Revolt (1998), were
released in France, Portugal, and Belgium. Energized by his early
accomplishments, Guy decided to take time off from university and
go to London, where he hoped to catch the eye of a major recording
label. Instead, he ended up composing music for advertisements,
a small triumph but not the right one.
“I was depressed, because that wasn't what I wanted to do,” Guy
says. His producer advised him that if he established himself in
Lebanon, the music industry's czars would seek him out.
On returning, Guy finished university and entered law school. He
often took breaks from his studies to drop in on music stores and
play their grand pianos under the guise of a potential buyer. One
music storeowner turned out to have his own label, Byblos Records.
Instead of calling Guy's bluff – he had no intention of buying a
piano – Naji Chahine signed Guy to a second two-album deal. But
his career wouldn't truly take off until after an idea popped into
his head like a thought bubble from a childhood cartoon: Arabic
dance music.
Guy's parents were pragmatists with artistic sensibilities. An art
collector and a financier, Guy's father liked to vary the paintings
hanging above the piano so his son's early compositions might soak
up the influence of different artists, different schools.
Guy never saw any contradiction between the worlds of business and
art. On the contrary, they were seamlessly united by the overarching
reality of his developing music career: “They're paying me to do
something that I would pay to do.”
When he created “Harem,” the first of many chart-topping Arabic
dance tunes, Guy tapped into a region-wide, foot-stomping, shoulder-shaking,
hand waving desire for harmony. In 2001, the tail wagged the dog:
EMI flew him to Paris to sign a multi-album deal.
During the last eight years, Guy has released several more albums
and worked with musicians from all over the world, many of whom
he brings to Beirut. “They are shocked,” he says. “They expect to
see desert and camels.”
Guy's influences and goals have shifted as he has immersed himself
in a New York-based mixing pot dominated by musical migrants who
speak English as a common language. Making his home in Lebanon,
however, has preserved the sense of normalcy that he believes creativity
requires.
“I never work at home, because I cannot work with my pajamas on,”
Guy says. I have to get up. I have to take a shower, have breakfast,
wear my coat, and go to the office.”
He'll pick out a new melody on the piano but often won't write it
down or record it. “If I forget a track, that means it's not good,”
he says. “It has to bug me, so that I'm convinced that it's good.”
He doesn't begin putting music on paper until early in the production
process, when he draws on the specializations of his regular collaborators
– at least 17 musicians, but sometimes more than 60. “I don't like
one-man shows,” he says. “That comes from my basketball years… In
construction also, I play a very small part. I do my job. I never
try to do somebody else's job in developing a project.”
When Guy's performing, he draws energy from his band and the audience.
He's not acting, Guy says, he's just being himself – but, he wants
to entrance listeners from the first notes. If he doesn't have them
immediately, well, he'll woo them.
“My band members are tough,” he says. “They know sometimes I change
songs within songs.” Guy's band stays in tune with him and he stays
attuned to the audience, his fans on their feet. Even when the hot
stage lights blind him, they're all he can see.
Contact:
editorial@onefineart.com
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