Double album release Black Lives, From Generation To Generation at Jammin’colorS.
Cheick Tidiane Seck, Immanuel Wilkins, Stephanie McKay, Sonny Troupé, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, David & Marque Gilmore, Reggie Washington, DJ Grazzhoppa, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Jeremy Pelt, Gregory Privat, Marcus Strickland, Alicia Hall Moran…and so many others gathered on the same album in a collective of artists who continue to fight against racism through music.
“Music is the weapon of the future”. The slogan of the totemic Fela Kuti remains relevant in 2021, as the problems that have divided the black and white world for too long remain significant in a society that seems to have for the most part been deaf to the messages of artists. Because the Nigerian is far from the only one to have brought the civil rights debate to the public arena. Nina Simone like Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield like Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba like James Brown, the list is too long of musicians who have made their medium an instrument of struggle. If the lines have moved in the field of music, the fractures are still gaping in a world that tends to retreat into closed identities and reactionary ideologies. This is the challenge of this project, whose title refers to the great American citizen movement, which has since spread across the planet. BLACK LIVES, FROM GENERATION TO GENERATIONa much needed message at a time when George Floyd and Adama Traoré died.
This selection designed by Stefany Calembert echoes this. The producer intends to demonstrate the vivacity of this message which has crossed generations for decades and which today, more than ever, encourages action. Here, the youngest are barely over twenty years old and the veteran will soon be celebrating his eightieth birthday. They were born in Ségou, Bruges, Washington, Chicago, in the suburbs of Pointe-à-Pitre as in the Bronx. They are American, Martinican, South African or Haitian, all united around this common cause, which in no way should erase the diversity of their origins which is thus expressed in a stylistic profusion. This is the other objective of this selection: to demonstrate in twenty titles the creativity of an Afro-diasporic community whose soundtrack tells through an abundant eclecticism the destiny of men and women who knew how to transcend this original wrenching to their continent.
This sound is that of the bottom of the holds of slave ships, it is that of rhythms reinvented far from their ancestral soil, it is that of a voice which manages to sublimate its pains, that of a saxophone which howls against segregation.
This sound is that of the Black Atlantic, this ocean made up of so many lives and deaths, this zone of flow and eddy, of goings and now returns, from which will have emerged both the blues and rap, jazz and beguine. At the heart or in the margins of this informal and yet very real space, those who did not have the right to speak expressed themselves, for a time in secret, today on all media channels, resonating at the highest this message of emancipation.
BLACK LIVES FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION Jammin’colorS / the Other Distribution. To be published on March 25, 2022. Freedom of expression would only be an empty word without the diversity of voices to carry it. That one is called Cheick Tidiane Seck, piano drum Malian; or Sonny Troupé, an enchanted drum from Guadeloupe; Reggie Washington, master groover whose bass narrates the whole epic of jazz; or Jean-Paul Bourelly, an erudite sound researcher who is digging a singular furrow in the direction of Haiti. This is what this selection is about: evils called blues, committed soul, phrasing that thunders… All of these coexist around the same desire to put an end to this black and white vision that does not has gone on for too long, as well Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano who mixes classical culture and unbridled improvisation, as Kokayi, hip-hop cantor capable of delirious on the octaves, DJ Grazzhoppa whose science of turntables is played beyond quarrels chapels like Jacques Schwarz-Bart whose saxophone has distinguished itself as much on the side of the good old nu-soul as on the jazz with Caribbean accents. No trances carried without this fundamental diversity of horizons, like a fitting echo of the fruitful post-modern thought of Édouard Glissant who, for having been among the activists of the first Congress of Black Artists and Writers at the Sorbonne in 1956, He was less involved in the same years in the fight against the colonial war in Algeria. Didn’t the philosopher-poet from Martinique say: “Since Césaire’s revolution and all that followed, we are beginning to understand that we are a composite people and culture. And this, today, is not a lack and a vice, it is practically an advantage“.
Our guests are Cheick Amadou Tidiane Seck, Sonny Troupé, Reggie Washington, Guimba Tamba Kouyaté and Stefany Calembert-Washington (executive producer).
Titles Performed at RFI at the Grand studio
– Sanga Bo, LIVE RFI Video RFI Videos
– Walk Feat. Alicia Hall Moran, from Black Lives
– Siya Woloma, LIVE RFI (original version on the album MandinGroove 2003) Video RFI Videos.
His : Benoit Letirant & Mathias Taylor.
CHEICK TIDIANE SECK (voices, keyboards). Born in 1953 in Segou, Mali. Composer, arranger and musician, Cheick has written and played with artists such as Fela Kuti, Mory Kanté, Salif Keita, Youssou N’Dour, Manu Dibango, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Joe Zawinul. He is known for his album with Hank Jones titled Sarah.
SONNY TROUPED (battery). Born in 1978 in Abymes, Guadeloupe. Sonny plays instruments such as the ka drum as well as drums, and mixes traditional Guadeloupean music and modern jazz. He collaborates with David Murray, Kenny Garrett, Reggie Washington, Mario Canonge, Grégory Privat, Jacques Schwarz Bart, Magic Malik, Lionel Loueke, Alain Jean Marie.
REGGIE WASHINGTON (low). Born in 1962 in Staten Island, New York. Reggie was a key participant in the Modern Jazz revolution of the 80s and 90s. He rose to prominence touring, recording and playing with Steve Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, Chico Hamilton, Oliver Lake, The Headhunters , Cassandra Wilson, Don Byron, Jean-Paul Bourelly and Ronald Shannon Jackson.
And for this session, the Malian guitarist Guimba Tamba Kouyaté was present. He has already come to our studio with Oumou Sangaré.
+ Bonus Tracks
– Super Biton de Ségou Ndossoke (AfroJazzFolk Collection Vol.1/ Mieruba/Deviation 2022)
– Old Farka Gabou Ni Tie (The Roots/ World Circuit/BMG 2022).
Realization : Steven Helsley.