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Includes unlimited streaming of Lionel Martin & Sangoma Everett "Letter To The World"
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Sangoma Everett and Lionel Martin have a long history together. It all began with their first album revisiting Count Basie's fabulous « Africa ». Imagine then, a duo climbing this summit once recorded in big band. The drummer and the saxophone player took up the challenge knowing full well that the key was not to stick to the score, but to retain its spirit.
Five years later, the two partners are once again involved in a strange affair recording a story about the blues, the soundtrack of a deported people that became the matrix of twentieth-century music. Once again, this complementary pair doesn’t intend to stick to the original groove, but to produce original variations rooted in their own reality. "The blues will never die out; it's a universal music that will always inspire musicians because it embodies love, sorrow and hope," insists Sangoma Everett.
Born in Virginia, Everett accompanied the venerable Memphis Slim, so the septuagenarian knows a thing or two about the subject. On the eve of his half-century, the saxophone player from Lyon with his furious accents is completely in tune, in his own way. "Blues is the essence. When we play, we both try to get to the bottom of our guts. Making a record is finding the right way to do it."
It's on the faith of a shared energy, of a style capable of going beyond the chapels erected on the altar of conformity that the duo commune with the desire to go beyond duly certified limits, more than they communicate around good old blues. For both of them, this music that was once synonymous with segregation still has in its depths enough to fuel a future that's a hell of a mess. "The future is not yet won, but the battles remain the same: it's time for diversity, for the unconventional, for no borders. At a time when everything seems to be closing in, you can lock up a bird, but you can't stop it from singing!”
Speaking of singing… It was the trigger for this return to the studio. Lionel Martin discovered at a sound-check that Sangoma Everett was a drummer but also a singer. He would learn a little later that at the age of sixteen, his American friend was already singing in a raw soul group, The 35th StreetGang. It was enough to tickle the ear of the man who worships the raw power of the Three Stooges. And it's only natural that we should find - and rediscover - Sangoma Everett declaiming the terrible Who Knows, borrowed from Jimi Hendrix, the prophet of esoteric blues. "They don't know, nobody knows..." True, but these two know how to take on the Himalayas without sounding hollow.
In the same way, they take Afro Blue, Mongo Santamaria's totemic standard and give it a singular sound, as profound as Sangoma Everett's voice drumming out the twelve bars when he intones: "Dream of a land, My soul is from, I hear a hand, Stroke on the drum..." At his side, the saxophonist's powerful counterpoint is in tune with the poetics that touches the very heart of the soul. Just like when the drummer evokes an old friend who's gone, Polo, in fact his neighbor in Chazelles, the little village in the Jura where he now lives. "He had a sense of sharing and camaraderie. He passed on to me his love of nature, having always lived in the country, he never knew the city. Since then, the drummer has been talking to the wall, to paraphrase the title, where he recites the words spoken to tell this story of exchanged feelings. Blues is also about these stories, the everyday, the little things that speak volumes about the state of the world. Like the saxophonist's heart-rending cry when, like a good anarchist, he begins Ni Dieu Ni Maître, a composition dedicated to Jean-Louis, "a non-politically correct tribute to my father-in-law whom I loved."
Other tracks, such as the solemn processional ballad Fane, or the funkier Chazelles with its bone-deep rhythms and riffy breath, also tell the story of this album, based on an educated dialogue between two personalities who listen to each other and to the world. To understand each other, you have to hear each other. Sangoma Everett sums it up by quoting Oscar Wilde: "Spread love everywhere you go..." This is also the message conveyed in Letter To The World, a poem by Emily Dickinson embodied by the voice of American Sophia Companion, "who we met on the immense web that is the Internet." A handful of words that sum it all up, according to Lionel Martin whose saxophone solo once again plunges us into the deep blue. This message sent to the world gives this collection its title. "It's like a letter in a bottle thrown into the sea. We wanted to write to the world to say that it's still beautiful, and that many people are doing wonderful things. It's like focusing on everything that's positive, those lights that give hope in spite of everything." Isn't that the DNA of the blues, this ability to transcend a harsh reality and invent a future that sings differently ?
credits
released March 15, 2024
Sangoma Everett : Drums / Vocals
Lionel Martin : Saxophones / Machines
Recorded and Mixed by Alexandre Potteck at Studio Altho
Mastering by Cedric Béron / disque noir
Text by Jacques Denis Translation by Gérard « Doudou » Gouirand
Photo by Bertand Gaudillère
Design by Valentine Dupont
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