L'Antidote

Three players, three displacements

The trio arrived from three different musical households. Rami Khalifé is Franco-Lebanese, a Juilliard graduate, and the eldest son of the oud player and singer Marcel Khalifé; for about fifteen years he led Aufgang, a group that set acoustic piano against electronics. Redi Hasa is an Albanian cellist who has been based in Italy for years, with long service in Ludovico Einaudi's touring band and recording work alongside Robert Plant. Bijan Chemirani is French-Iranian, a son of the zarb master Djamchid Chemirani, and plays tombak and daf as well as the saz lute; his credits run from Sylvain Luc to Sting, Piers Faccini and Serge Teyssot-Gay.

What the three have in common beyond conservatory-grade technique is biographical rather than stylistic: each grew up inside a family of working musicians, and each has lived through exile. The Montreux Jazz Festival puts exactly that at the front of its own billing for them, filing the trio under neo-classical and Oriental jazz and listing three countries of origin rather than one.

They first played together in February 2020, in Tuscany, in a short run of jam sessions that produced no record and no plan. The pandemic shut that down within weeks. The project sat untouched until September 2024, when the three reconvened in Apulia, in the south of Italy, to record.

The album that took four years to start

The debut, titled simply L'Antidote, came out on 19 September 2025 on Ponderosa Music Records in Milan. The organisers of the group's first UK appearance were explicit about the method: it was made without written scores, built out of improvisation and whatever the three had brought with them from their own geographies. Qobuz gave it the Qobuzissime badge on 22 September 2025, filing it as contemporary jazz and describing jazz, world music and discreet electronic elements layered as subtle effects inside the acoustic instruments.

Martin Longley reviewed it for Songlines in December 2025 and gave it four stars out of five. He described the opener, Pomegranate, as nimble piano over softly droned cello with what sounds like very light electronics and a flexible frame drum; he picked out Dates, Figs And Nuts for Khalifé's prepared-piano technique, an uptempo folk piece whose palm-muted sharpness syncopates against Chemirani's shakers and which carries the movement of a Levantine dabke or an Albanian kolo. The nine-minute penultimate track, Shadows Of Flowers On My Wall, he heard as a gentle curve towards eventual stasis and melancholia, and it was that arc, rather than any single piece, that he judged the reason the record holds. He reached for Maurice El Médioni as a point of comparison.

Clash supplied the line the trio's bookers now reuse most often: on L'Antidote, the cello speaks, percussion articulates and piano converses, a musical language beyond words. The single A Quiet Pulse was heard differently again by The Slow Music Movement, which called it a departure from the trio's more daydreamy material — an urgent contrabass line driving underneath, Chemirani layering hand-played and shaken percussion over it, Hasa's cello rising to what the writer called a screech of anguish, echoing the cries of the region's fearful and displaced, with Khalifé's reverb-heavy piano arriving late as the conciliatory voice. The verdict was fearless, borderless genre-fusing music at its best, with an explicit wish to hear it in a room.

A couture commission, reworked into a second record

In spring 2025 the trio was commissioned to write the soundtrack for Giorgio Armani Privé 2005–2025: Twenty Years of Haute Couture, the exhibition at Armani/Silos in Milan that opened in May 2025 and runs to December 2026. The score was delivered as functional exhibition music, played into the rooms rather than onto a stage.

That material did not stay in the gallery. The producer Alberto Fabris went back to the original score with the trio and reworked it into a standalone album, Sound Sketches: Music Composed for the Giorgio Armani Privé 2005–2025 Exhibition, with Valerio Daniele mixing and mastering. Ponderosa released it on 25 September 2026 on CD and vinyl. The stated aim was to make a record that works on its own terms while staying faithful to the spirit of the commission, and the press material describes a minimalist, hypnotic cello line repeating like a steady breath with piano and percussion threaded through it.

Rythmes Croisés, writing on 24 September 2026, treated it as the second instalment rather than a side project, and noted that the trio would present it in concert in Paris, at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, on 27 October 2026. Thirteen months separate the two albums.

Where they stand in autumn 2026

The first year of touring was mostly seated halls. On 9 November 2025 the trio played the Sale Apollinee at Teatro La Fenice in Venice, at 6.30pm, as part of Incroci in Musica, run by Ca' Foscari University with Veneto Jazz. Six days later, on 15 November 2025, they made their UK debut at Kings Place in London for the EFG London Jazz Festival, in Hall Two, twice in one day — stage times of 4pm and 8pm, at £37.50 inclusive of fees — presented by Serious with ArtStage and Vaak Records.

The 2026 diary is substantially larger and spreads well beyond the jazz circuit. Summer took in the Festival de Fès des Musiques Sacrées du Monde on 5 June, Musiques Métisses in Angoulême on 6 June, the Théâtre Antique at Les Suds à Arles on 17 July, the Montreux Jazz Festival on 18 July and Jazz in Marciac on 25 July. The autumn run is tighter still: Akbank Jazz Festival in Istanbul on 4 October, the Festival Theatre at Müpa Budapest on 7 October, Villa di Massenzio in Rome on 11 October, the Vatroslav Lisinski hall in Zagreb on 14 October, Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan on 22 October, Bouffes du Nord in Paris on 27 October, the H/earthbeat festival in Florence on 28 October, Flagey in Brussels on 29 October and De Warande in Turnhout on 30 October.

November continues at MC2 in Grenoble on 13 November, Cadogan Hall for the EFG London Jazz Festival on 14 November — a step up in capacity from the Kings Place debut a year earlier — Spazio211 in Turin on 17 November, the Théâtre de Villefranche on 18 November and Le Salmanazar at the Théâtre Gabrielle Dorziat in Épernay on 19 November. The mix of rooms is worth noting: concert halls and municipal theatres for most of it, but Santeria Toscana and Spazio211 are rock clubs, which suggests the booking is being pitched at two different audiences at once.

What the set actually is

The format changes with the room, and the published running times make that plain. At Les Suds à Arles the trio had sixty minutes in the Théâtre Antique at 9.30pm, inside a shared Soirée Suds bill where the same ticket — €30 reduced, €40 standard, €45 for the reserved section — also admitted the audience to Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI. At Müpa Budapest on 7 October 2026 the trio holds the Festival Theatre on its own from 8pm to 9.45pm, an hour and three-quarters with no interval advertised, on dynamic pricing between 5,900 and 11,900 forints.

The stage layout is the whole of the production: Khalifé at the piano with electronic instruments to hand, Hasa on cello, Chemirani with Persian percussion. There are no additional players and, on the evidence of the records, no written parts to follow, which means the sequence and the length of individual pieces are decided in the room. Müpa's own copy leans on that, describing a group known for its improvisational approach. Press coverage so far has been consistent on what the music does rather than what it looks like — calming, contemplative, built on space — and reviewers of the recordings have tended to end by saying they want to hear it played.