Toufic Farroukh is a saxophone player and composer of jazz with a middle-eastern flavour stemming from his bi-cultural roots in Lebanon and France.
His brother was a saxophone player and he’s the one who guided him to this instrument and taught him its ABCs. He was an amateur who instilled in Toufic the love of professionalism. They had discovered the saxophone in the Boy Scouts. The instrument was strange to their environment; unconventional, and used only for certain occasions.
Farroukh moved from Beirut to Paris, where he studied music in the conservatory and in the Advanced College of Music, saxophone was his principal instrument. He did not study jazz and its roots at all, nor played jazz on the saxophone.
His first album “Ali on Broadway” (1994), received good press from the specialist magazines, but only touched the French public in small measure. In his second album “Little Secrets” (1998), the flavour and colour of the Orient make their appearance here and there, in amongst the jazz motifs.