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.