Sol

Description

On his sixth solo album, Ezéchiel Pailhès returns with a new collection of songs with a sunny, wandering mood. A shared emotion runs through the twelve songs on Sol. One hears there the expression of bliss, nonchalance or desire, sometimes mixed with sweetness or joy, which singer Ezéchiel Pailhès has always associated with the idea of a melancholic happiness ("Saudade" in Portuguese), a mood that runs through much of his music and his songs, as well as Brazilian culture. Beyond this feeling, Ezéchiel evokes in his songs love, the passing of time, hope and lost illusions, moments of grace, the temptation of forgetfulness, escape or desire, through twelve singular songs whose understated arrangements blend acoustic and electronic instruments. This originality no doubt comes from the way the artist has made the Brazilian repertoire his own through these new songs. After Mélopée, his latest album of songs released in 2022, and the instrumental Ventas Rumba released two years later, the artist reinvents and modernizes on this album some of the finest works of MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), in particular a handful of classics (little known here) from samba and bossa nova from the 1950s to the 1970s, New Release Information signed or performed in their time by Vinicius de Moraes, João Gilberto, Tom Zé, Dorival Caymmi, João Donato, Os Tincoãs or Ataulfo Alves. The shift from Portuguese to French, and the choice of adaptation rather than simple cover versions, have allowed him to invent a form of prosody and euphony that is decidedly dynamic, unlike anything else in today’s French chanson landscape. On this new album, however, the Frenchman wanted to avoid any cliché. That is why each song is built around a subtle balance between Ezéchiel’s piano and synthesizers and understated arrangements of percussion, brass, bass and cavaquinho (a kind of small four-string plucked guitar), recorded in Rio De Janeiro with two musicians usually found alongside the legendary Caetono Veloso... joined by Thomas Harres, Antônio Neves, Eduardo Neves and Garbiel Loddo.