FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION (2 vinyls)

Description

"Music is the weapon of the future." The slogan of the totemic Fela Kuti remains relevant in 2021, so much so that the problems that have too long divided the world into black and white persist in a society that seems to have largely been deaf to the messages of artists. For the Nigerian is far from being the only one to have brought the civil rights debate to public stages. Nina Simone like Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield like Abbey Lincoln, Myriam Makeba, like James Brown, the list is too long of musicians who have made their medium an instrument of struggle. While lines have shifted in the field of music, divisions remain gaping in a world that tends to retreat into closed identities and reactionary ideologies. This is the whole point of this project, whose title refers to the great American civil rights movement, which has since spread across the planet. BLACK LIVES, FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION, a message more than necessary at a time when George Floyd like Adama Traoré have died. This selection, conceived by Stefany Calembert, echoes this. The producer intends to demonstrate the vitality of this message that has spanned generations for decades and that today, more than ever, encourages action. Here, the youngest are barely over twenty and the veteran will soon celebrate his eightieth birthday. They were born in Ségou, Bruges, Washington, Chicago, in the suburbs of Pointe-à-Pitre as in the Bronx. They are American, Martinican, South African or Haitian, all united around this common cause, which in no way should erase the diversity of their origins, thus expressed in a stylistic profusion. This is the other objective of this selection: to demonstrate in twenty tracks the creativity of an Afro-diasporic community whose soundtrack tells, through a teeming eclecticism, the destiny of men and women who have managed to transcend this original tearing away from their continent. This sound is that from the depths of slave ship holds, it is that of rhythms reinvented far from their ancestral soil, it is that of a voice that manages to sublimate its pains, that of a saxophone that screams in the face of segregation. This sound is that of the Black Atlantic, that ocean composed of so many lives and deaths, that zone of flows and eddies, of departures and now returns, from which emerged blues as well as rap, jazz as well as biguine. At the heart or on the margins of this informal yet very real space, those who had no right to speak expressed themselves, for a time in secret, today on all media channels, making this message of emancipation resonate at its highest. Freedom of expression would be an empty word without the diversity of voices to carry it. Whether it's Cheick Tidiane Seck, Malian piano drummer, or Sonny Troupé, Guadeloupean enchanted drummer, Reggie Washington, master groover whose bass narrates the entire epic of jazz, or Jean-Paul Bourelly, erudite sound researcher who carves a singular furrow towards Haiti. This selection talks about all of this: blues ailments, committed soul, thundering phrases... All these coexist around a common desire to end this black and white vision that has lasted too long, as well as Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano who intertwines classical culture and unbridled improvisation, as well as Kokayi, hip-hop singer capable of ranting on octaves, DJ Grazzhoppa whose science of turntables plays beyond sectarian quarrels like Jacques Schwarz-Bart whose saxophone has distinguished itself as much on the side of good old nu-soul as of jazz with Caribbean accents. No transcendent trances without this fundamental "diversality" of horizons, like a just echo to the fertile postmodern thought of Edouard Glissant who, having been among the activists of the first Congress of Black Artists and Writers at the Sorbonne in 1956, was no less, in the same years, engaged in the struggle against the colonial war in Algeria. Did not the Martinican poet philosopher say: 'Since Césaire's revolution and all that followed, we are beginning to understand that we are a composite people and culture. And this, today, is not a lack and a vice, it is practically an advantage.