We were unlucky with the weather this week, I had gotten used to have sun in June but recently we had rain. It made me think of a verse by Jacque Brel: J'en suis venu à prier Dieu - Mais on sait bien qu'il est trop vieux - Et qu'il n'est plus maître de rien (To the point of praying to God - But we all know He’s far too old - And no longer in command). Although he is sad about a woman and not the temperature, I believe he expresses a feeling of powerlessness that can be transposed when witnessing climat change. One rainy day of June I stayed in and assembled this playlist. This time I allowed myself to include a few rather long track when I usually limit myself to one, underestimating the patience of the listener. I also tried to remain consistant and not jump from the donkey to the roaster. Whithout further delay, here it is.
It starts with a song by the Paulistana band (and by that I mean to say they are from São Paulo) Höröyá which is composed of West African and Brazilian musicians. Höröyá means freedom, autonomy in mandeng (...) their music brings some important African roots, it is a summary of some musicalities and it has a musical construction that does not follow the Western standard, not based on harmonic sequences or on melodic themes for instance. Höröyá´s music is more focused on percussion bringing with it an essence of the African yards, the dance groups found in the Mandeng culture, a culture that has in Famoudou Konate one of its greatest representatives.(source)
We go on with a musician I discovered this year and cannot get enough of, for his capacity to explore so many different areas of music while remaining very coherent. I admire him as well for managing to greatly combine two genres that I love particularly: jazz and gnaoua. He has been featured here once before with Joachim Kühn and Ramon Lopez on the powerfull Enjoy. Majid Bekkas is also the co-artistic director of the festival Jazz au Chellah in Rabat since 1996. The song Bossoyo seems to me like a version of a song that comes back often in gnaoua music, I think that the song of Babkou Mustapha in the first playlist is one example. Although I have no proof of that at all.
The third track of the playlist is taken from an album that followed me since I am a kid, it was always around. Alla (Abdelaziz Abdallah is his full name) is an Algerian musician who built his first lute at 16 with a plastic can, a wooden piece, and bicycle brake cables as strings. Along his career, he developed a style he called Fondou, made of calm, improvised melodies that borrow to berber and arabic traditional music amongst other. A hypothesis as to the why of the term Fondou is that it is a combination of fond and doux which are French for substance and sweet, roughly, because fond is a difficult word to translate. I like that suggestion. His album is called Tanakoul, which means I am eating and I always found that intriguing but rather playful.
We take a jazz turn for the two tracks following with one taken from a quite interesting album that reunites a five exciting young musicians: Walter Smith III, Matthew Stevens, Joel Ross (he was included in last week's playlist), Harish Raghavan, and Marcus Gilmore. The album in called In Common. I added Unconditional Love because it is a song that is a rather rare example of a fully instrumental song in which I feel I understand the idea of it almost as if it had descriptive lyrics. When I listened to it the first time and read the title, I tought "oh yes, indeed". It doesn't happen that often but when it does I find it impressive because I guess someone with theoretical music knowledge would be able to explain its structure and make sense of it on a conceptual level when to my modest ears it remains an intuition.
We also have a song by Les Rallizes Dénudés, a japanese group I got into after reading this small text about them that you cannot read without wanting to have a glimps of it. We have Peter Doherty who I don't think I have to introduce, I really like his stuff as a loner guitar-poet. We have Mariana de Moraes who I litterally know nothing about but heard one album a bit randomly and quite enjoyed (I guess by now you know I am have a sweet tooth for Brazilian music). And we end with Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble who managed to make it twice into Sunday at Bob's with their majestic On the Beach.
Enjoy but only until 10h30 which is the check out time.
The receptionist
Playlist:
1. Horoya - Travessia – Abu Bakr II
2. Majid Bekkas - Bossoyo
3. Alla - Espérance
4. Matthew Stevens - Unconditional Love
5. Mtume - Kamili
6. Morgen - Of Dreams
7. Les Rallizes Dénudés - Kioku Ha Toi
8. Pete Doherty - Music When The Lights Go Out
9. Mariana de Moraes - Reposta
10. Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble - On the Beach
https://lyricstranslate.com/fr/sans-exigences-without-demands.html
To the point of praying to God
But we all know He’s far too old
And no longer in command
https://lyricstranslate.com/fr/sans-exigences-without-demands.html
To the point of praying to God
But we all know He’s far too old
And no longer in command
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