Atlas Maior

Atlas Maior delivers an experience of sounds from the Middle East, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and North and South America.

Atlas Maior is a music project based in Austin, Texas that maps diverse musical traditions, placing Jazz, Arab Turkish, and Latin American musical idioms in dialogue with one another. Atlas Maior composes music that pays homage to the stewards of these traditions and their cultural and geographic origins. Their unique sound balances intimate moments of sincerity with powerful cinematic melodies and incendiary rhythmic passages.

The band takes its name from the “Atlas Maior”, the first world atlas published by Joan Bleau in Amsterdam in the 17th century. Atlas Maior was inspired by the idea of creating original music that encompassed the group’s wide range of musical inspirations, including Egyptian composer Mohammad abdul-Wahhab, Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil, bassist Avishai Cohen, jazz artists Jackie McLean, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, and fusion projects such as Amalgama, Ojos de Brujo, and Shakti. The core members of Atlas Maior, saxophonist Joshua Thomson and oud player Charlie Lockwood, write original melodies exploring maqamat (the Middle Eastern modal system) and harmonic progressions of American jazz (utilizing melodic minor theory, and modal approaches). The group then adopts a wide variety of non-Western rhythms and percussion instruments including Indian tablas, West African shekere, Middle Eastern dumbek, and the Peruvian cajn to Lockwood and Thomson’s melodies as part of the creative process.