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The Flint Journal , Feature >>
Paris Ensemble carries international sound
By: Ed Bradley
According to Billboard magazine, Paris Combo has "the coolest sounds on either side of the Atlantic," but that doesn't mean the quintet accepts the label of "world music" act.
"In America, we're considered world music because our songs are not in English," says Paris Combo keyboardist-trumpeter David Lewis. He agrees that the Paris-based, internationally diverse ensemble is difficult to pigeonhole.
Although it's playing Thursday at Bower Theater in the Flint Cultural Center's Masters of Jazz and the Blues Series, Paris Combo isn't precisely a jazz act. But it began a decade ago as an act highly influenced by '30s and '40s French jazz-pop and remains rooted in the improvisational tradition of American jazz.
The group members come from a variety of backgrounds. Its lead singer, Belle du Berry - who writes Paris Combo's ideosyncratic lyrics, often about alienation and lost love, emerged from the French cabaret scene (and before that, punk rock). Lewis grew up in Australia and studied pop, jazz and classical music.
The singularly named guitarist Potzi, born to Algerian parents, is an acolyte of famed Paris jazzman Django Reinhardt. Madagascar-born bassist-singer Mano Razanajato provides a Latin influence, and French-born drummer Francois Jeannin applies swing and funk strokes.
"We allow people to put their own stamp on the group's style," Lewis says in an interview from Paris. "That has allowed us to fit fairly comfortably into a world model."
Of the combo's four studio albums, this year's "Motifs" (Koch Records) is the latest. It was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "music with the sort of engaging appeal that bypasses any need for definition or category ... what all music should - and too often doesn't - have to offer."
"I think 'Motifs' is musically more compact than the other albums, less of moving from one influence to another and more of combining those influences into a group sound," Lewis says. "That's what you want.
"When I listen to (the combo's past) concerts, I get the strong sense of a group that has been playing together for a long time. A lot of empathy is built up." That can be more evident to listeners than to the musicians, who take it for granted after doing so much playing."
On the Net:
www.rockpaperscissors.biz/index.cfm 11/02/05 >> go there
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