Each month, the music critic of the website Les Jours selects 5 new releases, here is his January playlist.
-Yinka Bernie, Who Do You Callfrom the album “Something New(Onaduja Yinka, 2022)
– Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, Ballfrom the album “Back 2(Bongo Joe, 2022)
– Rocio Marquez, Bronquio & 41V1L, From Mi – Rumbafrom the album “Tercer Cielo(Universal Music Spain, 2022)
– Little Simz, Brokenfrom the album “No Thank You(Forever Living Originals, 2022)
– Ali Farka Toure, Safarifrom the album “Traveler(World Circuit, 2023).
Then we receive the musician and ethnomusicologist Francois Picard for the exit of the box Pedro Bacan and the Pinini clan Remate.
In flamenco art, we can rematar.
The remate is a particularly dynamic part of the baile (dance), the toque (guitar playing) or the cante (singing).
The remate is used to conclude a moment of artistic expression by a multiplied effect: increase in rhythm, intensity, climax before an end, before silence.
In 1996, Pedro Bacán was at the top of his game. He is a major and singular figure of the flamenco guitar, a true thinker of this musical art and of the Gypsy-Andalusian culture, of which he is the heir. Perfectionist, researcher, he becomes a kind of reliable and innovative memory of flamenco.
” I have in mind this big house. Full of music, dominated by the personality of my grandmother, where, at any time, we could get together without any other pretext than the need to be together and sing “.
With a few artists from his family, Les Pinini, he undertook to pass on his experience of an intimate flamenco from the family cenacle to the greatest venues, to stage the intimate conviviality of reuniones flamencas, and to share with the public an experience which goes far beyond music. He conceives concerts which are also the spectacle of a way of life. In the center, his fluid, burning, visionary guitar. His quest for sincere communion, his pursuit of metaphysical emotion make him avoid all the traps of folklorism. The concert-show created in 1994, Pedro Bacán and the Pinini clan, has met with intense success on stages all over the world.
The meeting with the Pee Wee Music label took place at the Auditorium des Halles in Paris, during three concerts that remained memorable in November 1995.
We keep fond memories of particularly intense moments of work and sharing. Rarely had we come across such a search for sound perfection, for the exact accuracy to be found for each vibration produced by the guitar. Later, his sister Inès summed it up brilliantly by saying: “ He had an ear like a cathedral “.
This requirement had absorbed us an entire afternoon before the first performance and gave rise to a wonderful complicity, a friendship in dazzling music.
Pedro Bacán then decides to entrust Pee Wee Music with the realization of a discographic testimony of his show and proposes to our young label the creation of a flamenco department.
Thanks to the commitment of Ariel Goldenberg, then director of MC 93, thanks to the benevolence of Frédéric Deval, artistic director for the Auvidis label, the label with which Pedro Bacán had signed his most recent album From Viva Vozappointment is made for the live recording of the three performances in May 1996 in the great hall of Bobigny.
The original CD, resulting from these representations contains the science, the emotion, the beauty, the quintessence of the musical art of Pedro Bacán at the height of its intensity. It was immediately hailed by critics and met with remarkable success with the public.
In January 1997, on the eve of a series of concerts, scheduled for the release of the album at MC 93, the guitarist accidentally died on the road from Seville to his native village of Lebrija.
25 years later, it seemed essential to us to pay our homage to the genius of Bacán and to the mysteries of his music. With Carole Fierz, already involved in the production of the original CD, we have designed this new edition with the idea of offering new points of view and listening, in an attempt to report on a singular musical and human adventure. and striking.
The limited and deluxe edition “Remate” is composed of the remastered original album, “Pedro Bacán and the Pinini clan – live in Bobigny”, Grand Prix de l’Académie Charles Cros in 1997, and a new album unpublished solo dedicated to Bacán. We discover in particular a phenomenal buleria, found in the rushes of the Bobigny concerts. A sumptuous series of black and white photographs (silver prints), due to the talent of Philippe Fresco and taken during a concert at the Auditorium des Halles in Paris, opens an 84-page trilingual booklet. We come across the artist’s words and reflections, a masterful and delicate interview conducted by Francis Marmande, a fervent admirer from the start, and a text signed by Pedro G. Romero, an “undisciplined” artist, visual artist, researcher, great connoisseur of the field of aesthetic production of flamenco. He discusses the specificity of Bacán’s experience and vision in the evolution of this musical tradition, a link in a much larger story.
For further
– Pedro Soler, Inès Bacan and Gaspar Claus at RFI in the #SessionLive in 2017
– Documentary Ines, My Sister by Caroline Fierz
– Pedro Bacán.