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Artist:
Julia
Sarr and Patrice Larose
Title:
Set
Luna
Label:
Sunnyside
Records
Set Luna: Subtle Surprises from the Fresh Face of Africa.
An Unexpected Encounter of African and Flamenco Sensibilities between
Julia Sarr and Patrice Larose.
“A simmering album of subtle textures and futuristic connotations,
Set Luna contains equal parts duende, that ineffable spirit at the heart
of flamenco, and a distinct Dakar-rooted sound with an extremely promising
future.” — Richard Gehr, Carnegie Hall program notes, 10/2005
Senegalese-French singer Julia Sarr is full of subtle surprises. And
in a sense, she and French flamenco-inspired guitarist Patrice Larose
are living their music in reverse. “Our first big concert was at
Carnegie Hall,” Sarr exclaims. “Usually people arrive there
at the end of their career. For us it was the beginning.” The concert
took place in October of 2005 on a night billed as “Youssou N'Dour
Presents The Fresh Face of African Music,” after Sarr and Larose
had only played five concerts together.
Their collaborative album, Set Luna, released in America on January
31, 2006 Sunnyside Records (licensed from No Format! in France), is
for each their debut recording. “To me it is a solo album with
two people,” laughs Sarr. “I like the fact that my ‘solo
debut’ is with another person. I love the encounter. And I love
the fact that people in Paris have been asking when I would do my own
album, and they didn’t expect this. They maybe wanted simple easy
listening African folk songs. This is not easy listening. You have to
listen to it twice to get into it.”
“There’s an indescribably graceful mixture of depth and immediacy
to the stories Julia’s telling, transcending language and creating
a musical language which strikes right at the heart,” says Thomas
Rome, Youssou N’Dour’s manager and a champion of Sarr and
Larose. “In 1960, Miriam Makeba made a similar impression in her
first trip to New York, with Harry Belafonte’s help. When Miriam
performed, her voice was so captivating, so original. Robert Shelton,
in The New York Times, called her ‘incandescent.’ Within a
year, Miriam’s name had sprung from Carnegie Hall and the major
Greenwich Village jazz rooms to worldwide recognition. For me, Julia
Sarr appears to have a similar power on stage, something that sets her
apart from any other singer I’ve ever seen, except Miriam, with
whom she shares, to my mind, a startling affinity.”
Set Luna (So I’ve Observed, in Wolof) came about when producer
Laurent Bizot literally had a dream one night about Julia Sarr creating
a flamenco album. Sarr and Larose had met at a Paris concert in 2003,
but never expected to work together until Bizot brought them together.
Prior to this, each had been a backing musician. Sarr sang with Lokua
Kanza for twelve years, as well as backing for Youssou N’Dour,
MC Solaar, and Tony Allen, among others. Larose, who at age fifteen
was inspired by his Spanish grandfather to listen to flamenco guitar,
has collaborated with many jazz and Brazilian musicians, most notably
Marcio Faraco. Both artists start with tradition but do not limit themselves
to it.
“Originally flamenco came from India,” Larose says. “But
the funny thing is in Africa you find some rhythms that are the same
as flamenco. You find something very close to bulería in Senegal.
You find a lot of 6/8 rhythm in both flamenco and Senegalese music.
Another interesting thing is the style of singing. Youssou N’Dour
and Mali’s Salif Keita have something really close to El Camarón
de la Isla. I once told Salif Keita that his singing reminded me of
El Camarón. He said El Camarón is his favorite singer
in the world!”
Neither Larose or Sarr approaches their music on Set Luna as set in
tradition. Yet both use their roots as a launching pad, which may be
why Youssou N’Dour called Sarr “the fresh face of African
music.”
“Africa is in motion,” Sarr explains. “Because in Africa
we now have cable TV. You can have MTV in the village if you want. My
generation is the one that is emerging with a mix of Africa and world
sounds. We know our culture. We know about the singing, about the history.
And we also live in a contemporary world.”
“It’s funny but Julia doesn’t have a typical African
voice,” says Larose. “She has a lot of soul influence and
gospel influence. She doesn’t sing like most Senegalese people.
She has something different. So we wanted to add more aspects specifically
from Senegal.”
Listeners will be quick to realize that the title track “Set Luna
Djamonodjî” features the vocals of Youssou N’Dour. “Our
original vision was one voice and one guitar,” explains Larose.
“As we worked on the album we wanted to add a little more. For
percussion we thought of just one guy: Leïty M’Baye. And we
tried to call him, but he is really from another planet. We tried three
different numbers and after six months we gave up. When we were about
done, he showed up!”
Both Sarr and Larose talk about making music from the heart and not
worrying about whether the album would sell. Sarr pushed for ballads.
Larose was thinking about overlapping traditions. The compositions are
like a dance with both artists asserting in some places, conceding in
others.
“I was not worried about the results of the album,” Sarr explains.
“Usually people do songs and they want to be famous, to get somewhere.
We just wanted to invent something new together. It was a fresh encounter.
It was quite natural. We didn’t think about doing a jazz thing
or an African thing. We just said ‘Let’s do music together.’”
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Artist:
Cabruêra
Title:
Proibido
Cochilar
Label:
Piranha
Music
Freestyle from Brazil’s Dusty Northeast: Cabruêra’s
Electro-Sambas Prohibit Sleep
Music seems to flourish here, even if little else does.” —
Rough Guide to World Music
In the barren landscape of Brazil’s Northeast, only the hardy are
able to thrive. A deceptively lush tropical coastline hems in the country’s
least developed region: an arid, dry landscape prone to droughts and
intense heat, the unfortunate legacy of the colonial era’s over-productive
sugar industry. The lively culture of this region seems to have sprung
up in response to the harsh physical reality.
In 1998, six nordestinos, all with backgrounds in the contemporary music
scene, joined forces to find a way to bring their folk roots into the
modern era. Seeking counsel from an indigenous Tupí oracle, “they
were told they needed to start a band” to bring a new injection
of life to the communities of Campina Grande and João Passoa.
According to the oracle, the band was to be called Cabruêra, from
the word cabras, meaning “a group of goats,” and they were
to be as hardy as their namesake as they practiced the alchemy of music,
turning suffering into resistance. Their wise counselor sent them on
their way with a warning: beware of sleep. Such an endeavor would require
vigilance.
Hence Cabruêra’s new album, Proibido Cochilar (“Sleeping
Forbidden”): Sambas for Sleepless Nights is a dynamic mix of forró,
rock, jazz, funk, rap, reggae, and drum ‘n’ bass, undergirded
by the syncopated beat of samba. While it has been argued that Brazilian
music in general is marked by a fusion of influences only fitting for
a country with such diversity of ethnicities, cultures, and races, this
album offers a new take on Brazil’s worldly music. The tracks are
no jazzy bossa nova standards, lulling listeners like a warm ocean breeze,
nor quite the frenetic carnival vibe of Rio’s sambas. There is
an edge to this music, and rock energy not typically associated with
Brazilian styles known in the Northern Hemisphere.
Life in the Northeast asserts itself against the elements through the
nordestina folk traditions, markedly distinct from those in the southern
regions of the country, and frequently oriented toward community gatherings.
Song in the coco style is historically performed by a circle of singers
improvising rhythm and rhyme in a call-and-response format. Poetic wordplay
is set to the popular, dancey beats of forró (rumored to be a
corruption of the English “for all”) and often interspersed
with the African rhythms of maracatú. Forró is also the
name for the region’s country parties, at which musicians and dancers
get down in an athletic form of dance that makes the lambada look tame.
“At a good forró party the air is thick with dust raised
by the feet of tireless dancers” (from the liner notes).
Cabruêra’s take is music to wake up to, to stand up to, to
kick up the dust to. “Anyway, how could you sleep through a party
crowd dancing the night away from dusk till dawn?”
On the album, you will find odes to the elders of the Sertão’s
(the northeast hinterlands) musical culture, dance floor electro remixes,
nods to the traditional rhyme structures and beats of coco, and covers
of classics. Interwoven throughout are the guitar and accordion-based
rhythms that distinguish forró from its musical counterparts,
whose beats are more often built around percussion. The poetic folk-meets-youth
sound that defines Cabruêra is most striking in founder Arthur
Pessoa's “ballpoint guitar” technique: a true cross-era innovation
realized by rubbing the strings of an acoustic guitar with a cheap ballpoint
pen in an approximation of the sound of the traditional Guaraní
Mbyá, another of Brazil’s rapidly disappearing indigenous
ethnic groups. Reflecting Pessoa’s previous incarnation as a cultural
anthropologist, vocalist Zé Guilherme’s practices as a Buddhist,
art lecturer and mentor for street children, and all band members’
wide repertoire of musical styles and skills, this album is as much
a cultural study of Brazil’s underground as a funky soundtrack
for the world to groove to.
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Artist:
Auktyon
Title:
Pioneer
Label:
Circular
Moves
From the Leningrad Underground to American Stages: Auktyon's Graceful
Nonsense and Raucous Sensibility
As Russia's first democratically elected president Boris Yeltsin dissolved
the parliament and tanks rolled through the streets, Auktyon came to
Moscow from St. Petersburg to record their popular album, Ptiza (Bird).
It was the fall of 1993, and Russia was in turmoil.
“We had this little tape recorder, a portable one, and I put it
on the windowsill,” Auktyon singer and guitarist Leonid Fedorov
recalled later. He pressed “record” in hopes of capturing
the gun shots and angry crowds below, “but nothing recorded.”
Unfazed, the band ignored the riots on their doorstep and headed for
the studio to do some recording of their own.
What wound up on tape was a group of songs that, like Fedorov’s
blank tape that strange morning, bore no mark of the trauma and trouble
of life in post-Soviet Russia. Perhaps for this very reason, the songs,
along with Auktyon’s previous work, became the soundtrack for an
entire post-Soviet generation and went on to move critics and audiences
worldwide. Young Russians fell desperately in love with Auktyon’s
playful music and joyful romps on stage. The band’s art-for-art’s-sake
approach and knowing eclecticism was the perfect antidote to disenchantment
and monotony. On this flight into the wild blue yonder beyond troubled
Russia, Auktyon’s irrepressible energy strikes a universal chord.
The sound of this contagious chord defies easy comparison to Western
acts and stereotypes of Russian music. You may hear musical hints of
performers and genres as diverse as the Talking Heads and Charles Mingus,
Leonard Cohen and Plastic People of the Universe, and punk and klezmer.
What you won’t hear are balalaikas or Volga boatmen lurking in
Auktyon’s songs, though there is something more elusive that could
only come from cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, home of the darkness of
Dostoyevsky: the graceful nonsense of early 20th-century Russian poetry
and the playful earthiness of jam sessions in Soviet-era kitchens. Auktyon
has kept the best of Russia’s bohemian past alive, reassembling
it with rock sensibility. The result is utterly worldly, unabashedly
eclectic and instantly accessible to international listeners.
Now, for the first time, Auktyon is releasing a made-for-America CD
titled Pioneer, to be released on August 29, 2006 by Circular Moves.
They debuted for non-Russian audiences at NYC’s globalFEST in January
and will continue their North American introduction with a March tour
taking them to SXSW, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, NYC, and Toronto.
Though capitalism has taken Russia by storm and filled stores and airwaves
with commercial pop, the bootleg—that crucial part of the Soviet
music scene—is alive and well, and Auktyon embraces this underground
esthetic. Most rock and jazz were heavily discouraged by the Soviet
authorities, even as late as the 1980s. But people listened, just as
they read prohibited literature, by passing around bootlegs, tapes dubbed
from copies of copies recorded on the sly in makeshift studios or snuck
in from abroad. There were even informal “stores,” apartments
or clubs where you could go and get a hold of anything from Deep Purple
to Depeche Mode.
Bootlegs were part of what drew artists together, and Auktyon sprung
from just such an informal, vibrant group of people interested in music,
poetry and art in Leningrad. They listened to bootleg rock and put together
their own sound, a collage of the people and music on hand in a time
of loosening rules and worsening chaos.
The pastiche approach led to Auktyon’s most striking features as
a band: They have two front men (though one of them, Auktyon’s
vocalist Oleg Garkusha, argues that they really have none). Leonid Fedorov
sings sweetly and earnestly, while Garkusha punctuates complex layers
of instrumentation with angular chants and exclamations, standing ramrod
straight or shaking like a shaman in a midnight ritual. Around them,
the rest of Auktyon— Viktor Bondarik (bass), Dmitri Ozersky (keys),
Nikolai Rubanov (saxophone and bass clarinet), Boris Shaveynikov (drums
and percussion) and Mikhail Kolovsky (tuba and trombone)— eggs
the two vocalists on, while crafting a shifting collage of sound. The
voices act as instruments, and just as you do not need to speak tuba
or saxophone to understand the unexpected horn section, you do not need
to understand Russian to appreciate Auktyon’s vocal stylings.
Now that the dust has settled on the Soviet collapse, Auktyon are being
bootlegged themselves. Oleg Garkusha chuckles that he gets a kick out
of collecting these unofficial recordings, sold in markets and kiosks
from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. Auktyon came from the Soviet underground
and now enjoys a place of honor in the Russian mainstream, thanks to
the broad appeal of their wildly catchy songs.
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