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Danhomey Songs
Label: Very Good Music & Fanphant Music
Released: 2025
Views: 21
Album Description
It's a long time trip that Nicolas Genest is offering us with his new album « Danhomey Songs ». It took him 10 years to achieve this back to his beninese roots project. The music speaks from an ancient land, an ancient realm weaved with ancient dialects. Still it sounds so contemporary. Songs indeed there are, voices singing in different dialects constituting the core of the music. It was the voice that mesmerized him on his first trip to Benin, when he heard a traditional song blasting out of an autoradio in the streets. The expression was raw, abstract, vivid, like nothing he ever heard. He was hooked for good. Although the music is dense, complex, rhythmically and harmonically challenging, it grips you by the heart and soul. Listening to it let you dive and spin in a vortex of tones, spaces and lyrical melodies and improvisations. Blending jazz, classical and traditional music, the orchestration is very idiosyncratic, sometimes reminiscent of George Russell and Stravinsky. The band is a real gang, packed, focused, sensitive and warm. Genest trumpet and flugelhorn can be fierce and soft, brilliant and velvety, always looking for new horizons and expressions. It's not by chance that John Clayton, Chris Potter and Lionel Loueke (beninese himself) are taking part of the project. This must have CD will be released on the 24th of October on all digital platforms and there is also a medium length making-of documentary to come. For our European and French friends, there will be a release concert at the New Morning Paris on the 26th of October.
Album uploaded by Stefan Bongiu
