Les Traversées Festival > June 24th

Louis Sclavis, saxophone / Annabelle Luis & Bruno Ducret, cello / Keyvan Chemirani, zarb – daf

Nomadic Jazz

In the presence of a trio of musical tight-rope walkers, the saxophonist Louis Sclavis takes some offbeat paths between jazz, written music and Persian tradition, with a panoramic sense of imagination and inspiration .

Flagship figure of European improvised music, Louis Sclavis, the saxophonist and clarinet player, has always rubbed his XXL size jazz with other musical traditions, whether they are from nearby or far away. The Cadences du monde (Cadence of the World), his latest project for a quartet, is inspired from a book by the photographer Frédéric Lecloux, “L’Usure du monde” (“The Wear of the World”, a nod to Nicolas Bouvier’s “L’Usage du monde” translated as “The Way of the World”), the fruit of a journey from ex Yugoslavia to Pakistan, via Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Landscapes that Sclavis, supported by three musical tight-rope walkers like himself, produce compositions which spin at times and are sometimes contemplative, eventually becoming like the stages of a pulsating imaginary voyage.

Youmna Saba, oud, electronics & vocals

Lebanese music and poetry

Flagship of Beirut’s alternative scene, Youmna Saba, with her electronically augmented oud, explores the musicality of the Arabian language when it is sung: it’s a moment of poetry which is both outside time and unsettlingly modern.

Since her beginnings in 2006 in Beirut, Youmna Saba has continually developed towards refinement: she came from the pop world and gradually turned towards music tinged with electroacoustics, with electronic processing suddenly difracting, upsetting or extending the sound of the electic oud that she accompanies herself with. She is moving towards refinement and poetry: today, she’s interested in the musical structure of the Arabian language, and how it can be modelled on the composition itself when it is sung. It is both pared down and rustling with a lot of infinitesimal details, fragile and inhabited, her intemporal music could only have been created today.

Meet and greet with Youmna Saba, hosted by David Sanson, Noirlac Abbey artistic advisor.

Bring your own food to our picnic or just book one of our picnic baskets

Oua-Anou Diarra, tambin – talking drum – jeli ngoni – Calabash – vocals
Regional Orchestra of Normandy – Jean Deroyer, director

African Symphonic Fresco

From a jazz background, the double bass player Yves Rousseau delivers with Alter Ego a breathless – and very cinematic – “encounter between two worlds” (orchestral writing and oral tradition, Europe and Africa). Here we are talking about common listening, resonance and pulsation.

“When I composed this suite divided into seven distinct pieces, I dreamed, imagined and then gave life to the meeting between two worlds, that of written music and that of oral tradition: a path marked out with melodic and rhythmic encounters, which takes care never to erase the particularities of each world, instead always trying to include them as resonance.”  It is in these terms that double-bassist Yves Rousseau, from a jazz background, presents Alter Ego, a suite for orchestra commissioned by the Regional Orchestra of Normandy. Creating a dialogue between classical musicians and Oua-Anou Diarra, the Burkina Faso multi-instrumentalist, Alter Ego should be enjoyed as a film where we are allowed to create images, as of we were listening to a passionate conversationbetween two wise old men. A conversation which is impressive with its beauty, the extent of its themes, its melodic, rhythmic and sonic wealth.

https://www.orchestrenormandie.com/programme/alter-ego-22-23/

https://yvesrousseau.fr/projets/alter-ego/