Sami Moukaddem Quartet: Lullaby for Godzilla/Live at Whelan’s review

The Irish music scene has been enriched over the past couple of decades by the immigrant musicians who choose to base themselves here. And Sami Moukaddem has been here longer than most.

Since arriving in Dublin to study psychology at Trinity in the 1980s, the Lebanese-born guitarist has been a distinctive voice on the Irish scene, releasing a string of fine albums that blend jazz with the sounds of his homeland, and with some – such as Resistance: Soul Food, and The Facts of Life for the Palestinian – overtly referencing both his own personal history and Middle Eastern politics more widely.

Lullaby for Godzilla and its companion live album, both double CDs, form part of a larger project from the guitarist – which includes a forthcoming documentary film and a TedTalk that has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube – on the theme of depression. Recorded in Dublin in September 2018 (one in Ventry Studios and the other live at Whelan’s), they are generous, open-hearted attempts to manifest Moukaddem’s own therapeutic process through music and feature the guitarist’s long-time associates, bassist José Carlos Flores and saxophonist Brendan Doyle, who bring both musicality and empathy to proceedings.

But it is the presence of American drummer Joey Baron, here providing a masterfully subtle rhythmic backbone to the quartet's sound, that will bring Moukaddem's music to a wider audience – and deservedly so.