La femme aux yeux de sel

Description

Gabi Hartmann is the singular world of an artist who blurs the lines between pop, folk, jazz, soul, and world music. She sings what inspires her in several languages, escaping categories. She has managed to establish her very own style, but also her ambiguous emotion: a voice with a warm, clear timbre, at once gentle, melancholic, and soothing. Her self-titled debut album, released in 2023, has been listened to more than twenty million times and sold over 15,000 copies (the best-selling Jazz/World release in France that year), earning her the Gold Disk Award for Best New International Artist in Japan, as well as high praise in the French and international press, and a string of sold-out dates (at the Francofolies de la Rochelle, La Seine Musicale, and La Cigale). Today, Gabi returns with her second album, titled La femme aux yeux de sel. This album opens with a nursery rhyme that tells the story of a woman named Salinda, who lives on a dreamed-of island, where her salt eyes melt with every tear she sheds. To heal her eyes, she sets off on a journey in search of the secrets of salt. Is the album the little mirror of this tale? Gabi discovers herself there and grows through the songs, learning to know herself by questioning both the world around her and her inner world, as well as her life experiences as a woman. Above all, she tells of her emotions: the joy of her travels and the difficulty of opening up to others, the melancholy that haunts her, the anger she feels toward a sick world, suffering, anxiety, and then the wonder of nature that heals her. She draws her inspiration from women artists: Salinda is inspired by the Rumba des îles taken from Marguerite Duras’s film India Song, (composed and arranged with Oan Kim). She pays tribute to Latin American music and in particular to female voices such as Mercedes Sosa, as well as to South African singer Miriam Makeba, who has inspired her for years. Finally, this album is the result of beautiful collaborations, both longstanding (Oan Kim and Jesse Harris) and new: Syrian flutist Naïssam Jalal can be heard on the track Le lever de Soleil, which questions the state of the world. This track, like Love High and Ton monde secret, was composed and produced with saxophonist and composer Laurent Bardainne (who has collaborated with Camélia Jordana, Jeanne Added, and November Ultra). One can also recognize the work of Baptiste Trotignon, with whom she composed the track Mélancolie, elevated by the emotion and elegance of the string arrangements by Brazilian composer Maycon Ananias. With its latent melancholy and richly colored, rhythmic universe, Gabi gradually makes the boundaries between eras and styles more porous in order to write a dreamlike world of her own. That is the secret of this personal, multifaceted record, demanding and accessible in equal measure.