Resistance

Description

Jacques Schwarz-Bart — « Resistance » Resistance is the new album by Jacques Schwarz-Bart, with Reggie Washington (double bass) and Arnaud Dolmen (drums) — and an artistic act of resistance in the face of the rise of fascism in Western democracies. Rooted in a rare biographical lineage, the album draws on the legacy of André Schwarz-Bart — Jacques' father and the youngest resistance fighter in France, who took up arms at age twelve against the Nazis — and Simone Schwarz-Bart, his mother, co-author of La Mulâtresse Solitude, a novel dedicated to one of the greatest figures of resistance to slavery in Guadeloupe. Between these two stories — resistance to Nazism and resistance to colonial oppression — a lineage emerges that Jacques Schwarz-Bart carries through music. Resistance is also a musical cartography of the Afro-diasporic heritage. Each composition traverses a pillar of this heritage — Guadeloupe, Cuba, Brazil, Louisiana, Harlem — and pays homage to figures of resistance, including many Black women: Sarah Maldoror (Guadeloupean filmmaker, activist for African independence), Maya Angelou (poet, voice of Black American freedom), Violetta Chaville (pioneer of Afro-Caribbean cultural expression). The album also honors the Maroons of the Caribbean (Neg Mawon) and André Schwarz-Bart himself (Song for Abraham S.). The lineup — saxophone, double bass, drums, without harmonic instrument — is itself an act of formal freedom. "Harmonic instruments often confine improvisers within a predetermined chord framework. Their absence opens up an additional space of madness." The trio, bound by more than twenty years of loyalty and mutual trust, creates a raw, instantaneous, always living sound. Resistance is not just an album. It is a testimony. A sonic act of defiance. A celebration of memory. A call to courage — and to love. Recorded at Studio Quai Son, Perthes (Seine-et-Marne), February 2026. Recording, mixing, and mastering: André Baille-Barrelle.