Trumpet star Ibrahim Maalouf doesn’t put music – or people – in boxes

It’s almost unheard of for a modern-day trumpet player to break out from the niche world of jazz clubs. But Ibrahim Maalouf, who fills arenas in France and attracts sizable audiences worldwide, doesn’t make music that sounds like that of a typical trumpeter.

His custom-made instrument has a fourth valve, rather than the traditional three, so he can play quarter tones – the notes between notes. Mr. Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon and raised in France, credits his dad for inventing the microtonal trumpet. 

“For me, quarter tones are in all music, from blues to Negro spirituals to Indian music to folkloric Gypsy music,” says Mr. Maalouf in a Zoom interview. “The reason why my father created this trumpet was to play the Arabic quarter tones, the Arabic scales. But a good musician could use it for any kind of music.”

On Feb. 5, Mr. Maalouf will be attending the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. He and Beninese American songwriter Angélique Kidjo are best global music album nominees for their collaboration, “Queen of Sheba.” Mr. Maalouf’s other 2022 release, the hip-hop influenced “Capacity To Love,” features guests such as De La Soul and rapper D Smoke. The two albums showcase his stylistic breadth. He is guided by a musical philosophy: If his compositions help people see beyond musical boxes, maybe they’ll see past other divisive labels, too.

“He’s really open-minded,” says Norwegian trumpet player Nils Petter Molvær, a pioneer of fusing jazz and electronic music, in a Zoom interview. “He doesn’t care very much about genres.”

Mr. Maalouf grew up listening to the Arabic and classical music of his father’s trumpet and his mother’s piano. One day, when he was a boy, his mother came home with a vinyl single of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” that she’d won in a supermarket competition. 

“I played it, and suddenly my body started to move and I started to dance,” he says. “I had never heard something like this before.”

Smitten by pop music, he took up the synthesizer, once waking his mother at 3 a.m. with his playing. But his main focus was studying trumpet. It was a way to bond with his strict father. Mr. Maalouf won classical music competitions and studied at a well-known Paris conservatory. “All this was because my father wanted me to be the best trumpeter, not because I wanted it,” he says. “I said, ‘That’s over. I’m done. Bye-bye. My trumpet is out of my life.’”

He briefly dallied with the idea of becoming an architect. But a burgeoning desire to score movie soundtracks inspired Mr. Maalouf to retrieve the instrument from its box. He was filled with new gratitude that his parents had always encouraged him to compose music. The musician resolved that, this time, he wouldn’t try to impress others with virtuosity. Even so, it took him years to develop a more soulful way of playing. Onstage, his happy eyes now gleam as much as his trumpet. 

“He has enormous dynamics in his playing, from the very, very, very soft to pretty hardcore,” says Mr. Molvær, who has performed with Mr. Maalouf. “He has his very own voice. You can say, ‘Ah, that’s Ibrahim.’ Sometimes his trumpet sounds like a different instrument, like a flute or something from the Middle East.”

In 2015, Mr. Maalouf utilized that ability on an album of songs by Oum Kalthoum, Egypt’s iconic singer from the early 20th century. When he performed “Kalthoum” at Lincoln Center in New York, it was ostensibly a jazz concert. But after an Egyptian in the audience started singing along in his first language, Mr. Maalouf explained to attendees that what they’d been listening to was a traditional Arabic melody. 

“There were people [saying], ‘Wait, what?’” he recalls. “What I like is when you prove to all the people who are listening that we actually all share exactly the same melodies. We just dress them differently.”

Soon after, Mr. Maalouf teamed up with Ms. Kidjo for a conceptual suite about King Solomon meeting the Queen of Sheba. It was challenging to write music for words in the Yoruba language. Once the trumpet player latched on to the rhythms in the singer’s phrasing, it opened a portal between African and Middle Eastern modalities. 

“It sounds like a real mix, not a superimposition of things,” he says. 

The artist’s 15th album, “Capacity To Love,” opens with Charlie Chaplin’s monologue from “The Great Dictator,” a film that mocked Adolf Hitler, in which the character calls for unity and a recognition of universal brotherhood. “When I see what’s happening everywhere in Europe, the far right, extreme right getting more popularity, it makes me wonder if people really learn from past mistakes,” says Mr. Maalouf. “Suddenly, I had this speech by Charlie Chaplin in my head.”

Mr. Maalouf says that people too often judge others by their skin color, the way they’re dressed, or their religious beliefs. But he believes there’s a lesson in the way that “Capacity To Love” finds common ground between hip-hop, New Orleans R&B, Romani music, and 1970s jazz fusion.

“If you are able to discover what is behind the external aspect, that means you understand philosophically what this music is about,” he says. “That means we belong to the same world. And we can think about a better future, all together.”