MAGIC MALIK KA-FROBEAT (vinyl)

Description

The Magic Malik Ka-Frobeat project came into being in 2017 through the initiative of the late Hilaire Penda, bass player, composer, and myself. Hilaire, originally from Cameroon, and I, originally from Guadeloupe, wanted to offer music that represents this closeness as well as this identity-based distance. The group is made up of musicians who are not necessarily directly linked to these Afro-Caribbean cultures. And yet, Hilaire and I knew that this diffuse Africa is present in the younger generations in a way that is often unconscious but strong. Afro-Caribbean culture is a global, international, multicultural, “exocultural” cultural fact. The musicians came together through an affinity with the music we were proposing, because it already resonated in them as the echo of an obvious belonging, beyond the fact of being African or Guadeloupean. Julien Reyboz, the band’s sound engineer and artistic director, as well as Zaf Zapha, the band’s bassist and also artistic director, took on this project together in order to offer a recorded version of it. As the band’s leader and composer, it is a great emotion for me to be able to share this project in which, for the first time, I embrace myself as a singer. Of course, the flute punctuates it. With this group, I am moved to rediscover my nomadic Creole and yet “anchored” in the water that connects these lands of Africa and Guadeloupe. Ka-Frobeat is the meeting of the “Ka”, the drum of traditional Guadeloupean music, and “Frobeat” as in Afrobeat, music created by Fela in Nigeria. It aims to be the heir to Gérard Lockel, Esnard Boisdur, Fela, Eugène Mona, who represent in my heart the stages of the initiatory journey that led me to this project. Magic Malik Ka-Frobeat is dedicated to the late Hilaire Penda, who was the first to “take it under his wing,” in his own words, with his festival “les rares talents”. One day I met a Guadeloupean in the Paris metro who questioned me about my origins. I told him it was complicated... He cut me off in my attempt to explain and asked me “ès ou ka palé kréol”? I replied yes, that it was my father’s language. He summed it up with these words that have remained anchored in me ever since, as I am anchored in the music of this project: “Si ou ka palé kréol alos ou sé moun Gwadloup” This man was telling me that territory is language, that anchoring in a culture, a land, is language... That day, this stranger made me, forever, a Guadeloupean. “ -- Magic Malik---.