After the excellent Radyo Siwel in 2018, Mélissa Laveaux is back with a new and fourth studio album: Mama Forgot Her Name Was Miraclea spiritual, poetic and highly emancipatory record.
When she debuted in 2008, Mélissa Laveaux was already an alchemist of song through her first album Camphor & Copper (No Format), revealing the contours of his cosmogony: a guitar offered by his father at 13, poetic texts in English and Creole, a feline voice, a haunted folkblues where a mystery resides. The one who cut her teeth as an activist in the punk-fem milieu of Ottawa will continue her musical path by crossing the Atlantic to settle in Paris where she now lives and give birth to Dying Is A Wild Night (No Format, 2013), a second opus largely inspired by this initiatory journey.
Uprooting is an integral part of Mélissa Laveaux’s musical DNA: before her, her parents fled Haiti for Montreal in Canada when her great idol, the Haitian resistance fighter Martha Jean-Claude, sang about her beloved island from Cuba, where she took refuge in the 1950s during the Duvalier dynasty. And it is partly to restore this lost link with Haiti, to heal exile, that with Radyo Siwel (No Format, 2018), Mélissa Laveaux drew as an ethnomusicologist from her musical traditions to unearth nursery rhymes and lost songs, also reminding us how much music can be an instrument of political resistance.
After a triumphant tour that ended at the Trianon in Paris in October 2019, the guitarist, singer and poet now reveals herself in a more intimate light. At 37, Mélissa Laveaux is now exploring the therapeutic and spiritual dimension of music by revisiting an ancestral form: the lullaby. Because if the rituals and models we inherit are sometimes faulty, outdated or even retrograde, we are free to innovate! With Mama Forgot Her Name Was Miracle, Mélissa Laveaux brings the lullaby back to life by summoning powerful voices from beyond time to create a whole new mythology. Alternative. Modern. Subversive. Because to change legends is to change the present. As an archivist of feminist and social struggles, as a facilitator, Mélissa Laveaux therefore appeals to a community of heroines that History has forgotten or voluntarily marginalized. So many archetypes whose talent, nerve, commitment, resilience and great freedom constitute an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the musician.
Thus from one title to another we come across Harriet Tubman, Jackie Shane, Audre Lorde, Helen Stephens, the goddess Lilith, La Papesse Jeanne, Ching Shih, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Faith Ringgold, Ana Mendieta or even Alexis Pauline Gumbs… Alternately healers and warriors, the members of this choir-courage asserted themselves by refusing to content themselves with surviving, submitting to assigned standards or undergoing a destiny they did not have selected. Like Jackie Shane, a transgender pioneer of Canadian soul whose groundbreaking love songs paved the way for so many others. Like Ching Shih, a Chinese sex worker who preferred to become the most respected pirate in the South Seas at the beginning of the 19th century. Again like Harriet Tubman, a former African-American slave who helped hundreds of other oppressed people find their way back to freedom.
An immemorial link between worlds and cultures, original music therapy, witch music par excellence, the lullaby undoubtedly remains the first gesture of care, the purest love song. A magical ritual which, for Mélissa Laveaux, is full of incantations, prayers and keys, mystical or metaphorical, to find the strength to deconstruct one’s fears, transcend one’s traumas and be reborn healed – or at least hardened. Necklace of electric amulets worn by a rhythmic conversation between the Caribbean and West Africa, Mama Forgot Her Name Was Miracle then said: “Let’s dare to live! Fiercely, free and flamboyant! #subjectification”.
Unity is strength, the adage has already proven itself, so Mélissa Laveaux surrounds herself with a reliable brigade of sound wizards. Let us mention in particular to the realization Guillaume Ferran (Griefjoy, Julien Doré, Victor Solf), Fin Greenall aka Fink (Ninja Tunes) or Mathieu Senechal (Charlotte Cardin). On instruments: Voyou (trumpet, clarinet), Clyde Rabatel (keyboards, piano), Mathieu Gramoli (drums), Steve Yameogo (bass, guitar), Sébastien Delage (guitar). Not to mention a few select guests who add a bit of their magic to the mix: November Ultra (“Rosewater”), Dope Saint Jude (“Half a Wizard, Half a Witch”) and Oxmo Puccino (“Lilit”).
In Mama Forgot Her Name Was Miracle, Mélissa Laveaux puts her militant poetry and her folk-punk groove at the service of an atypical pop, mobilizing the superpowers of gift, creativity, joy, beauty, metamorphosis and intuition. For us and for herself, Mélissa Laveaux thus reactivates, as a formidable storyteller of deep waters, a miraculous vital force which, contrary to appearances, is never completely annihilated. A great album, to be discovered live on this show and the January 20, 2023 at the Théâtre du Châtelet.
Titles performed at the Grand studio
– The whale Live RFI see the clip
-Rosewater, Feat. November Ultra, from the album see the clip
– Half Wizard, Half Witch Live RFI see the clip.
Line Up: Melissa Laveaux (guitar-voice).
Sound: Benoît Letirant, Fabien Mugneret.
Playlist by Melissa Laveaux
– Bulerias of a caballo malo – Ralphie Choo
– Pisonia prologue – Tora-i see the clip
– The Truth – Sampa the Great
– Ayuwe – Martha Da’ro.
► Scrapbook Mama Forgot Her Name Was Miracle (Twanet 2022).