Safy Boutella


Safy Boutella is an Algerian musician, arranger, composer, and record producer who graduated from Berklee College of Music. He is the father of dancer and actress Sofia Boutella. He is best known for creating with Khaled the album Kutché, his album Mejnoun, arranging Nass el Ghiwane, and many young artists since the nineties. He also composed for Djamel Allam Djawhara, more than seventy movies soundtracks, and five musical frescoes.

Biography

In 1981, back from the United States, he gave several underground concerts in Algeria, developing a music based on compound rhythms and the fusion of North African, Oriental, and Western sounds. In 1986, with Cheb Khaled, he released the album Kutché, which he co-produced with Martin Meissonnier and for which wrote arrangements.
In July 2007, he celebrated thirty years of music: Orient, Khmous Alik, Kotidien...ZARBOT concerts, named after the spinning top. With more than forty musicians on stage, including twenty strings, guests testifying to his collaborations as arranger for Cheb Khaled, Djamel Allam, Abdy, opera singer Fadela Chebab, and the singer Selma Kouiret.
In 2010, he was contacted by the Festival Mawazine in Morocco to revisit the repertoire of the Moroccan group of the 1970s, Nass El Ghiwane. In 2012, he was invited by the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar to perform with his musicians at the award ceremony for films in competition.
Since the 1980s he has written more than seventy film scores, collaborating in Algerian, French, English, and Italian cinema.
He collaborated with Rachid Bouchareb on music for Little Senegal films, Poussières de vie, Cheb, and Merzak Allouache for Salut Cousin. The music of Christophe Ruggia's film The Gone of Chaâba is one of his contributions. He was the lead actor in Taïeb Louhichi's Layla, My Reason.
Boutella has composed and staged grandiose shows : Rêve Bleu in 1988, La Source in 2001 before an audience of 90,000 at the Olympic Stadium in Algiers.

Private life

Safy Boutella is the father of dancer and actress Sofia Boutella. She danced for Madonna during the Confessions Tour in 2006 and Sticky & Sweet Tour in 2008, and for Michael Jackson in 2009. She was in the films Kingsman: Secret Service, Star Trek: Beyond, and The Mummy. He is also the father of actor Azad Boutella, who was in Informer, Herrens Vege, The State, and Young Blood. He is Colonel Mohamed Rabah Boutella's son.

Discography

Film-documentary concepts
Movie soundtrack