World music

Live Session Kepa and Jawhar

© 62TV/Pias / Ed.Miliani

By: Laurence Aloir

7 mins

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Our 1st guest is

 for the release of his 2nd album

(Éditions Miliani).

It's always the same song, the one that fits in one word.

Five letters, three consonants and two vowels.

A B, an L, a U, an E and the plural mark at the end.

An international word, which designates at the same time a music, an emotional state and vaguely a color.

Do you have it there?

Hush… You don't have to write it down, or name it, so as not to fall into its clichés, or take listeners to Kepa's second album there.

Kepa doesn't want to hear about it anymore, yet he has it.

In his metal guitar which, in the right hands, resembles an Aladdin's lamp, a mythological sword.

In his harmonica, this instrument that makes the brain tremble when played with the heart.

In his everyday life and even every yesterday.

Deep in his guts, like a shiver that rises to his vocal cords,

a super power to be afraid of too.

In his genes, his aching body, his altered blood.

In the title of this new album,

.

The first, released three years ago, was called

.

A beginning of concept, always the same song, like a long-lasting affection.

Kepa caught it like a disease.

In 2013, Kepa was called

and he lived the life of a professional skateboarder, an augmented human able to travel far and soar on a skateboard.

Suddenly, he felt himself growing old.

Consumed by an autoimmune disease that has turned his life upside down, the hounds of hell are on his heels, who will never let him go.

He found a lifeline, without wheels but with strings, in music, practiced on his metal guitar and preferably on one or two rotating chords, in search of an inner trance, a musical vibration. -therapeutic, of a self-shamanic rite.

Bastien became a musician, releasing in 2018

first album produced with Taylor Kirk of the Canadian group Timber Timbre.

The album was very well received, and hundreds of concerts made known Kepa, his humor, his music and his pretty shirts.

Kepa at RFI.

© Laurence Aloir/RFI

But, despite all the good we thought of

, we can affirm it without boasting:

is a thousand times better.

was a calling card.

is the story of an expedition to the depths of oneself, a journey to the end of confinement.

No one will hear you scream.

He made this record to try to understand, tame and tell about this illness that turned him upside down to the point of implosion, on the verge of madness.

"

, he sings in duet with

on the incredible dark-pop song Eldorado, a real hit from the new world.

Lead in Eldorado, that's kind of what everyone's been feeling since 2020, right?

The ordeal of some is Covid-19, his is called HLA-B27, for human leukocyte antigen.

No one can experience it for him, but everyone can feel and appreciate how he healed himself with

.

The first track is a bit like his

(Muddy Waters).

A bass harmonica solo like a train song, which would have had its place on

, but which suddenly swirls, goes out of order and announces the sequel.

The train has just derailed and entered another dimension, that of opiate vertigo, loss of control, music that dreams and drifts... A song will sound like the soundtrack of a western where Kepa makes a duel with himself (Dog Days).

Another takes old Bukka White and Alan Vega dancing in a Detroit club during an earthquake (Wet Dream).

For two occasions, Kepa kneels without prostrating himself in front of intimate totems:

by Skip James (with

), and

by

in a hallucinated version, where we see the ocean freeze around the Cape Verde Islands.

Kepa.

© Ed Miliani

Six feet under 

remains in the tropics for a murder ballad.

The song

is almost playful, indolent, a refrain in a trance.

The instrumental Messe HLA-B27 shows Kepa's dazzling guitaristic progress, freed from stylistic exercises, becoming his own master.

His voice has also changed, he pushes it towards the complaint in hooting highs.

He plays different instruments, keyboards like stalactites, trumpet and other things with his mouth, sound effects of unidentified origin.

He is the one-man band of the Titanic, ultimately the only survivor of the sinking, then stranded on a desert island – the last piece, Merle, resembles the pagan prayer of a levitating Robinson.

The album is now complete.

No one will come out unscathed.

And everyone will have only one desire: to return.

Stephane Deschamps.

Performed titles

-

, Live RFI

-

from the album

-

Live RFI

-

, from the album

Then we receive

for the release of the album

(62TV/PIAS).

Jawhar at RFI.

© Laurence Aloir/RFI

Tasweerah

is the fourth album by Tunisian singer/songwriter Jawhar.

means in Tunisian both: portrait, image, but also: projection of the spirit… The album is a series of freeze frames, more or less personal portraits.

The songs are, each in their own way, attempts at a universal portrait of the artist.

They question its place and that of the imagination in society, put "creation and the quest for beauty" at the center of the album.

Deliberately raw and without artifice, Tasweerah plunges us back into the chiaroscuro folk / pop of Jawhar, proclaimed in the Arabic Dream Pop category.

Born to a mother who was a professor of Arabic literature, in love with music and poetry, and a father who devoted himself to theater and then to cultural politics, Jawhar grew up in the suburbs south of Tunis, in Radès.

Very early on, he was fascinated by a certain popular culture, by the strength of its images and its verbal, musical and gestural expressions.

When he left at the age of twenty to study English in Lille, it was rather abstract poetry that attracted him, that of William Blake and Emily Dickinson... In addition to a growing love for a certain Nick Drake who will link him irrevocably to his impressionist folk.

Jawhar.

© 62TV/Pias

Performed titles

-

Live RFI

-

, from the album

-

, from the album

-

Live RFI

Sound:

,

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