Singer Julia Sarr and guitarist Patrice Larose weave secret connections between Senegalese and flamenco music.

See them on stage at the Paris festival of their label, No Format!

Every self-respecting label should be the reflection of the vision and subjectivity of its founder.  But – even at the heart of so-called “independent” entities – this ideal often hits the wall of a certain implacable logic of economic realism and the partitioning of tastes.  Laurent Bizot, who created No Format !, has nonetheless decided to pursue the ideal without any compromise:  since 2004 his label has operated as a kind of refuge for irregular spirits of all sorts.

From the pianistic knitting of Gonzales, to the sampled montages of Nicolas Repac, to the high-wire act of Marcel Kanche and friends, every No Format ! record grabs in full flight some expression of creative imagination which the record industry usually sees fit to neglect.  The results – sometimes unequal – bear out a laudable aim to open up another field of energies in the French musical landscape.  In the course of the coming month, these intentions will be put to the test because the label is holding the first edition of its own festival, where a number of newly-signed acts can be discovered (1).

At the center of this catalogue in the form of an open program, the musical arabesques put together by the “Senegauloise” Julia Sarr (voice) and the “Spaniard from Normany” Patrice Larose (guitar) merit special attention.  The duo’s first album, Set Luna, surely ranks among No Format !’s most dazzling successes, embodying in such a convincing manner the label’s desire to bring to light new and unexpected languages, as if out of a dream.  As a matter of fact, the idea of putting these two musicians together - each of them having been more accustomed to working in the shadow of other stars than to making records in their own names - literally came to Bizot in a dream.  “Laurent called me one day to tell me that he had had a dream in which Patrice and I were playing together,” Julia Sarr explains.  “We hardly knew each other, but our respective worlds were not very far apart, since I had been the backing vocalist for Lokua Kanza et he, on his side, had accompanied, among others, Márcio Faraco.”

Sarr and Larose’s music might be described as a fairly improbable encounter between Senegalese music and flamenco. The singer’s  recitatives in Wolof – which trace a clear line from the declamatory art of the griots to the flaming postures of the cante jondo – and the elegant virtuosity of the guitarist – a formidable purveyor of harmonic and rhythmic inventions – are an a priori support for that characterization and hypothesis.  Resistant to any labeling, the twelve titles of Set Luna far transcend this supposed happy marriage of genres however.  They betray instead the complicity of two souls nourished by multiple experiences and influences (jazz, pop, Brazilian song…) who have chosen to tune their sensibilities to one another so as to create together the most purely condensed language possible.  “Flamenco and Senegalese music appear on the record,” Patrice Larose clarifies, “but as shadowy rather than dominant presences, as cultural imprints which we could never undo within our musical selves, which it would have been useless to try to erase.  In the end, our music, which has taken form little by little, really can’t be defined in terms of geography.  I’m happy with the result, because we’ve succeeded in finding things at the very depths of ourselves and then in combining those things into something which is not just a simple collage.”

This perfect balance is best illustrated by the finely-wrought relationship between Sarr’s voice and Larose’s strings.  Joined by a few invited guests (singers Youssou N’Dour and Leity M’Baye, percussionist Mino Cinelu…), these two elements converse as equal to equal, in a dialogue rich with digressions and which excludes any idea of hierarchy.  It is a fusion which evokes, precisely for all of that, the greatest duo performances of flamenco.  “When Camarón and Paco de Lucia play together,” Larose reminds us, “you really are hearing two parallel songs.  Flamenco is a music of counterpoint, and this is how Julia and I composed our songs together:  Julia’s voice and my guitar pose questions to each other, and answer each other.  My tastes naturally incline toward music in which the lyrics and music are enlaced in one another, whether it be in the classical composers or in, say, people like João Gilberto or João Bosco.  With them, the idea of putting voice and guitar in balance is really taken very far:  one never knows which element is going to take over.  It’s very beautiful and yet unsettling, and this is just what Julia and I have tried to produce.”

-- Richard Robert

(translated from French by Liron Joseph)

1 « L’Atelier No Format ! » at the Théâtre de l’Atelier, Paris; Misja Fitzgerald Michel, Julia Sarr/Patrice Larose and Nicolas Repac November 21 [2005]; Rocé, Mamani Keita and Faya Dub the 28th ; Gonzales + guests December 5.