ukandanznew album Kemekem
Aesthetes know this. Whether in terms of music or alcohol, the most unlikely combinations sometimes lead to the strongest emotions. The Ukandanz cocktail has already proven itself, but it’s back to strike again with an explosive formula. Ethiopia’s old pulses are still shaken by garage rock and libertarian jazz… If you were wondering if the heart of the swinging Addis scene of the 1960s was still beating, you know today who handles the electroshocks! In more than twelve years of backpacking and five albums, Ukandanz has built a solid reputation in the world of globalized music. The group is back for a new epic towards the sources of its music. The modern cantor, the electric griot Asnake Gebreyes points the direction to a pack of musicians in working order to stir up the trip between France and Ethiopia a little more. They love getting lost in crossroads as much as finding themselves in detours… In the absence of orientation, they have a sense of the epic! The essence of this modern trance machine still resides in the Ethiopian soul, with two fundamental elements: the elastic voice of one of the greatest figures of the current Addis Adeba scene (Asnake Gebreyes) and the compositions of the founder Damien Cluzel, a liberated electron never so much at ease than in musical or cultural crossovers. As for what concerns the physical existence of the group, the bodies there exult in the energy of rock and the catharsis of improvisation (or the reverse).
Damien Cluzel goes from guitar to bass without losing any of his electricity, and thus opens up a whole new field of possibilities in terms of writing. The always accomplice Lionel Martin blows hot and cold with a sound imprint that radiates to the silences that accompany it. Fred Escoffier, keyboardist who has experienced his rhythmic solidity with a fine flower of French jazz, returns to the group to bring his virtuosity and his appetite for unbridled improvisation. Charge to the young newcomer Thomas Pierre, an excellent drummer with a wide sound palette, to complete the polyrhythmic edifice in the service of an abundant music, between structures of traditional inspiration and controlled skids resulting from modernity. Amaury Rulliere.
With Kemekem, Ukandanz is back after an instrumental album released in June 2022. The azimuth combo has found its voice with its emblematic singer Asnake Gebreyes, still bubbling with the millennial forces of his native Ethiopia. Marrying the unfathomable Ethiopian musical tradition with a contemporary and libertarian reinterpretation, Ukandanz continues its work of public utility with this new opus. With as much subtlety as savagery, the group transmits a new version of an Ethiopian crunch of which it is an invaluable pioneer. The fundamental polyrhythms explode in contact with progressive rock, punk and the sound experiments of this pack united by years of live. The instrumental textures keep the new relief imprinted on the last album recorded without Asnake Gebreyes. His return raises the temperature even further… Incandescent prophet of an unbridled and powerful celebration!
Titles performed at the big studio
– Kemekem Live RFI
– Endihe new Fiker, from the album Kemekem
– Ajebesh lederesh new Live RFI.
Line Up: Lionel Martinsax, Fred Escoffierkeyboards, Asnake Gebreyessinging, Thomas Stonebattery and Damien Cluzelbass guitar.
Sound: Mathias Taylor, Laurie Plisson.
Album Kemekem (The Company 4000).
Then we receive the pianist Denis Cuniot for Denis Cuniot Plays Nano Peylet.
In the 80s, when you were a musician and you wanted to be part of the avant-garde, you had to sound “jazz”. A pianist with whom I talked a lot, reinforced my idea that there were other modes of expression not yet explored.
One of these modes in particular triggered strong emotions in me by the simplicity and beauty of its melodies, it was Jewish music which has since found the name of Klezmer music. At the time (the 80s) I was doing free-jazz in the group ARCANE V. We always put in the program of our concerts one, often two pieces of traditional Jewish music. There were two reasons for this: the first was aesthetic: going from free to trad, back to free, back to trad, was a pleasure, you could say a delight, constantly renewed. The second was much more intimate. Half of the group was of Jewish origin, and remained very present the idea that the Shoah must not be forgotten one day.
The pianist I was talking about above is called Denis Cuniotand we founded an exclusively Jewish music duo, for which it was necessary quite quickly given the few written traces of the repertoire, (oral tradition requires), to compose concert music since there were no more traditions of musicians who went from village to village with a hundred melodies gleaned from right to left, at random encounters.
Play in front of a seated and silent audience, they did not know. We lived with the music, sometimes we danced, almost always we ate, we made noise, that didn’t prevent them from playing. And as musicians always find it easy to adapt to new mores, the world has seen music arrive in cinemas and pubs, then on television, in MJCs, cultural centers, festivals and all this mixing has allowed it to structure itself around new genres which have resulted in the emergence of numerous compositions among which the public has been able to discover klezmer music for piano, thus finding themselves faced with an infinity of possibilities that one would have had difficulty in imagine twenty or thirty years earlier. I like the piano as much as I like the clarinet: I had the chance to develop on the latter a phrasing from the oriental aspect of klezmer music. Now I continue this research on the piano, which offers an extraordinary palette of colors, which allows me to develop my ideas and also, of course, offers me in the person of Denis Cuniot the ideal interpreter, pioneer of this art and lifelong friend, who is ready to embark on extremely arduous work to stick as well as possible to scores which can sometimes be very complex. Nano Peylet.
From 1983, I was one of the main initiators of the revival and recognition of klezmer music in France by co-founding a duo with Nano Peylet, at the time clarinetist and saxophonist of the jazz group ARCANE V, then clarinetist of Bratsch. In my “jazz years”, I had met Nano.
In his family history, he had no connection with Judaism, but he had met during his studies and from the beginning of his career all the musicians and singers who had, in the 70s in France, an authentic knowledge of Yiddish and klezmer music: Eddy Shaff, Teddy Lasry, Maurice Delaistier, Youval Micenmacher, Ezra Bouzkela, Talila, Jacinta, Ben Zimet… And he played in the two major formations of that time: Kol-Aviv and Adama.
He had had as a jazz teacher, Philippe Gumplowicz (guitarist of ARCANE V), who later became a university professor, a great connoisseur of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Nano also knew Giora Feidmann and her record production very well. He loved this Ashkenazi culture.
His friends and colleagues who came from this universe told him, explained to him the illogical logics. With them, he had already built up a large repertoire of Yiddish and Hebrew songs and niguns, klezmer melodies, theater music and dances. This meeting to the sounds of Free Jazz, a friendly and musical encounter was to have the greatest influence on my artistic life since it was by and thanks to Nano Peylet that the revelation came to me klezmer. This musical and friendly love at first sight happened to me when, on Nano’s proposal to put together a klezmer repertoire (Hassidic, as we said at the time), I did my first rehearsals. I then understood at the height of me that I had found my artistic path, my place of inspiration and permanent work, my daily subject. This was the beginning of my musical and militant commitment. Activist because at that time, nobody in France knew this music (including in the Jewish community). I was aware that it had been annihilated in the countries from which it came and that we had the task and the duty to make it re-heard, to revive, to recreate it: a duty of memory, a duty of today. Memory of a repertoire, of a musical genre. memory of musicians and dead poets. Musical since since then, almost forty years later, I have made about ten records, all published by Buda Musique, music for films, theater performances, several hundred concerts, as well as conferences, expressing in various forms and formats, my attachment and my creativity in the klezmer and Yiddish universe.
Today, I am happy and moved to bring my contribution to the questions that Nano Peylet asked us in the early 1990s:
What had traditional music been before it became so? How to make new with old?
Are traditional music doomed to be old?
Couldn’t we compose old music right away?
Make new with old, new with new but also old with new?
He had thus brought to light the concept of “pre-traditional music”.
Today, I asked him again to compose works for me and to offer me some arrangements. This disc. My interpretations of Nano Peylet’s dedications are all dedicated to Perrette Salon. Denis Cuniot.
Titles performed at the big studio
– Ballad for Jeanne + Alon’s Doïna Live RFI
-Lomir Zikh Iberbeten, from the album Denis Cuniot Plays Nano Peylet
– Doina + Sirba de Leuville Live RFI.
Line Up: Denis Cuniotpiano.
Sound: Mathias Taylor, Jérémie Besset.
Album Denis Cuniot Plays Nano Peylet (Buda Music 2023).