Biography

Safy Boutella (Arabic: صافي بوتلة; born 6 January 1950) 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 (kind of Algerian anthem), more than seventy movie soundtracks, and five musical frescoes. 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 (some of which are the fruit of work with the Tuaregs): Rêve Bleu in 1988, La Source in 2001 before an audience of 90,000 at the Olympic Stadium in Algiers.