Gabi Hartmann is the good surprise of 2023. The French artist stands out elegantly in the footsteps of Melody Gardot. Between jazz and bossa. She is the guest of the SessionLive where she will play 2 titles with the clarinettist Robbie Marshall. At the opening, Sophian Fanen presents the discographic news in 5 titles.
Every month, the journalist and music critic Sophia Fanen shares his current obsessions:
– crime, ‘A Sirataken from the album “Scuru Cauru” (Airfono, 2023) see the clip
–Smokey Robinson, I Wanna Know your Bodyfrom the album Gasms (Smokey Robinson, 2023)
–Lucia Antunes, Alive pt. 1from the album Carnival (CryBaby/Infiné, 2023)
–Kassin, Perfeito (feat. Chiara Banfi)single (LAB 344, 2023)
– MC Yallah, Sikwebelafrom the album “Yallah Beibe” (Hakuna Kulala, 2023) see the clip.
Then we receive gabi hartmann for sound output 1er album.
We can talk endlessly, but we don’t necessarily know very clearly where Gabi Hartmann’s voice takes us: a jazz bar in the basement, a tropical beach at dusk, a terrace on a slope in Lisbon, the background of a Parisian brasserie on a winter’s night? We close our eyes and pass, entwined, the shadow of a jazz legend, a bossa nova diva, a great lady in black from French or Portuguese song, somewhere at the crossroads of exquisite chic and vertiginous melancholy, consoling sweetness and shared spleen. A few months after an introductory EP, Gabi Hartmann’s first album is finally released, produced with Jesse Harris. They meet in 2018 in New York. He brings everything that makes the glory of his collaborations with Norah Jones, Madeleine Peyroux or Melody Gardot. Gabi Hartmann also brings a personal musical history in the making, but already dense. Childhood and Parisian family listening to song, rock and music from everywhere. Classical piano until the age of fourteen, when she exchanged it for her brother’s guitar to write songs. Jazz arises in rewind after his discovery of Amy Winehouse and his covers of Ella, Sinatra or Nat King Cole. Jazz lessons at the Schola Cantorum then at the Conservatory, a detour through Brazilian music by living two years in Rio de Janeiro, a year of ethnomusicology in London, returning to Paris to intertwine projects in ten genres and three languages.
When Jesse Harris asks her to produce her album, she sees it as an invitation to “bring together all that I am”, she says – the love of Billie Holiday and Lhasa de Sela, her friendships for the Sudanese flautist Ghandi Adam and for the Guinean guitarist Abdoulaye Kouyaté, his admiration for the immense crooner Henri Salvador and his memories of travels in Africa, his brand new equipment and venerable splendors written before the birth of his parents… As soon as they met, the two musicians wrote and recorded between New York and Paris. Little by little, Gabi’s songs emerge, the coherence between her love of the great jazz standards and her confessions of young Frenchwoman of her century, between her fascination for the music of the Tropics and her Parisian poetic instinct… While preparing this album, she opens for Jamie Cullum or Melody Gardot, regularly visits the mythical jazz club Le Duc des Lombards, sees the rumors about his name grow… and scholarly. And here is what the album confirms: warm and precise tone with an ounce of elegant casualness, equally tightrope walker charm in French, English and Portuguese (and also for a few verses in Arabic), timeless aesthetics and a frank look at its time (The seatragic title on the fate of migrants in the Mediterranean), phrasing of an idol of the record and class of classics of Cinecittá, introspective author and plural composer… Here is what the Americans call singer, and who is called lady in French, too gifted to show herself as in herself as well as to put on the clothes of legend.
Titles performed at the big studio
– Thousand Shores Live RFI see the clip
– The seafrom the album
– misunderstood love Live RFI.
Line Up: Gabi Hartmanvoice, guitar, Robby Marshalltransverse flute.
Sound: Jérémie Besset, Mathias Taylor.
► Album gabi hartmann (SonyMusic 2023).
Next concert, November 27, 2023 at La Cigale, Paris.