A espetacular charanga do frança
The Importance of Being Espetacular

Reissue de l'excellent projet Ladja sortie en 1981. LOUIS XAVIER est un artiste complet, sincère et talentueux. Il est à la fois : contrebassiste, guitariste – bassiste, auteur – compositeur, arrangeur, chef d’orchestre, acteur prolifique et influent de la scène parisienne depuis les années 70. On le retrouve à l’initiative de nombreux projets musicaux et culturels. Son histoire, c’est d’abord une histoire de rencontres et d’amitiés fidèles.LADJA : se réfère a la Capoeira, cette danse guerrière des Brésiliens, cette sorte de lutte très acrobatique, qui se pratique au son d’une musique spéciale, laquelle réglemente les différentes phase du combat

Le musicien et tenancier des groupe et bar fictifs Mild High Club signe un quatrième album en forme de purgatoire pour temps troublés.Quand certains disques, comme les derniers albums en date de Björk, semblent être le produit ou une fraction d’une dimension parallèle vaste comme le monde et totalement inexplorée, d’autres ont l’air, à l’inverse, d’appartenir à un espace-temps plus modeste aux limites connues.C’est le cas de Going Going Gone, nouvel album du génial multi-instrumentiste Alexander Brettin, qui rassemble tout ce qu’on entendrait dans un petit bar de nuit qui porterait le nom de son vrai-faux groupe : le Mild High Club où funk déglinguée, bidouillages électroniques, musique brésilienne et free jazz cohabitent sans heurt.

It comes in 2013 in Brazil, and is fastly become an important record for Folk lovers ! Providing a deep and meditative production ! Indispensable ! This is my first solo record. It was made during an unexpected but very welcome exile, in a land I wouldn't have predicted I'd linger for too long; the west of the west. From there on it's turning around, so I thought. My arrogance was to think that I'd be immune to the promised land effect, the invitation wasn't for me, I was passing through, and not particularly impressed. But the sense of distance and my newly acquired refreshing anonymity kept me staying, they felt useful. I found myself leaning on that distance, projecting onto it, the space echoing back to me with a new voice. There was my double, in the distance, a company, the only viable witness to that distance, a critic of what I was craving, a bully, a brother. This realization produced a dialog, an attempt to reconcile with this onlooker, a plan to think less and feel the way though, as the jockey craves to merge in spirit with his vehicle, to be guided by it. Cavalo means horse in portuguese, a word we also use for people who channel spirits in service, something normal to us in Brazil. Another instance of an amalgam between vehicle and vehiculated, and writing these songs felt like that, an attempt to merge these often conflicting voices, the mind and the gut.I was as a foreigner, enamoured by the new and yet still attached to the luggage I thought I had left behind, dragging things I thought I had abandoned. They say we travel just so we can come back, I say we do it to look back, even if we never return. Distance was a gift to me measured by a certain discomfort, a type of pain that floods without drowning, that washes. Maybe that's what saudade means. I don't feel I am ever possessed when I write but I do feel I am a vehicle to a voice I hear and sing back to in an ever so slightly failed attempt to portray it.I have repeatedly found myself a foreigner, so I grew up imagining I was brave for it, an explorer, moving from city to city every three years as a kid, pretending to have the forbearance and courage I ended up forging while secretly carrying the resentment of the imposed detours, of the wait to return. When I finally arrived back in Rio no longer a child and with an accent three times tampered I realized that my home town wasn't mine, that I had invented it in light of what I saw elsewhere, its memory a dream of scents and light that didn't seem to exist in space, maybe in time. I discovered myself a stranger, what I had been since I first left and knew to be temporary, what I realized was definitive. And it was a bitterness at first but it slowly turned into something sweet, warm, I felt free and grateful, I suppose I had to invent that too, cut the bushes to a new path. I departed again.I ended up finding myself in a type of desert, dry with foreign trees, a fake oasis, so I thought. I was happy to feel alone, overwhelmed with the void clear of familiar reflections, with immense silence, a mirage at last, the place where I wrote these songs from. I believe that everybody can feel foreign in one way or another; in the way that they feel they're perceived by others, in their bodies, their streets, in their fate perhaps, so I dream that this feeling turned into songs, a vehicle to me, a tool that served me and moved me, can also move you, serve yet others, with luck.To give room to the voice of this echo, amplify it, I opened up as much space in the music as I knew how, subtracted all undue, undressed arrangements, threw adjectives away. I used different languages to forge a new voice, one empowered by lack of vocabulary, without subterfuges, one that had to know what it wanted to sing. I also threw away the cover of the album. Everything that was inside protected by the cover came out, naked, clean of directions, added flavours, serving suggestions. Words, simply. And the simple beauty of the page revealed itself, black and white that we like to use as a synonym of things clear and exact, but that is where the infinite delight of interpretation resides, where the fertile gap is. A page is beautiful because it's only a possibility, it has to be entered to signify. Inside the sleeve only the music. And there was yet another distance: inside and outside, words and music. the thing and the name of the thing, me and my name in print. Between one and the other is the open hand, the train at the station, an opening in the veil, a familiar scent: the unpredictable mirror, echoing.Thank you for the chance.Rodrigo Amarante crédits

After the success of "Ogooué", the compilation from Gabonese artist François N'Gwa, Into The Deep Treasury presents RIDDIM POETRY. A second opus, shining the light on the emergence of the reggae movement in France, through a selection of hidden gems from the 80's.Carefully restored and remastered, Riddim Poetry is an off-beat journey composed of 7 masterpieces influenced by several styles (Pop, Library, Raï, Disco) which characterised the strength and diversity of the French culture in the 80's.

Allegedly Coltrane’s favourite singer, Andy Bey recorded as vocalist for Max Roach (“Members, don’t git weary”), Horace Silver (“Won’t you open up your senses”), Gary Bartz (“Celestial blues”) and Stanley Clarke in the late sixties/early seventies, released one solo album, and then disappeared from view for over 20 years. "Shades of Bey" (originally released in 1998) showcases his four-octave range, the intimacy of love songs and raw power of the blues on a mixture of standards (“Pretty girl”, “Some other time”), Latin (“O cantador”, “Drume negrita”), modern (Nick Drake’s “River man”), and a couple of original tunes. Available for the first time on vinyl, it features Andy on vocals and on piano, and appearances from Gary Bartz and Geri AllenAndy Bey's bass-baritone voice has aged over the last thirty-odd years, but it's aged well; he now sings in a husky drawl that sounds all the more warm and intimate for being a bit ragged around the edges. When he goes into falsetto, as on "Midnight Blue," athe sound is so dark that you don't recognize it as falsetto at first. This album peaks early on with "Like a Lover," a wistful love song with only the gentlest, sparest guitar accompaniment. But there are many other beautiful moments, the best of which always come on the slow numbers: the Billy Strayhorn classic "Pretty Girl," on which Bey sounds like Billy Eckstine with a weathered patina to his voice, and the surprising Nick Drake cover, the moody and intense "River Man." His vocal version of Thelonious Monk's "Straight, No Chaser" is fun, but it tends to expose the limitations of his range; however, he makes the uptempo "Believin' It" work beautifully -- Geri Allen's edgy, modernist piano contrasts nicely with Bey's effusive, bop-inflected delivery. (allmusic)