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Suite for Battling Siki

Mauro Gargano

Label: GAYA Music
Released: 2016
Duration: 00:58:00
Views: 818

Tracks

1. Introduction 01:04 2. Round 1 Saint Louis 08:14 3. Travaille avec la Tête 00:34 4. Jumping with Siki 02:14 5. Round 2 Marseille 06:39 6. Peu 00:58 7. Round 3 Amsterdam 08:58 8. Au Bar 01:54 9. Round 4 Paris 07:17 10. Et Alors? 02:01 11. Round 5 Dublin 08:19 12. Confiance 01:02 13. Round 6 New York 06:03 14. Retour à Saint Louis 02:32

Personnel

Mauro Gargano

bass, acoustic

Jason Palmer

trumpet

Ricardo Izquierdo

saxophone, tenor

Manu Codjia

guitar, electric

Bojan Z

piano

Jeff Ballard

drums

Adama Adepoju

poet / spoken word

Frederic Pierrot

poet / spoken word

Album Description

In 2006, the French rapper Rocé, in Identité en crescendo, an album where Archie Shepp but also Jacques Coursil crossed paths, wrote: “France has memory problems / She knows Malcolm X but not Frantz Fanon, not the FLN / Knows the Blacks but not the Blacks / Spreads the cowboys and Indian stories / But the cowboys and Algerian tragedy shouldn't be known ”[1]. Martin Luther King has public places in his name, but not Edouard Glissant. We know the fights of Jack Johnson by heart, but not those of Battling Siki. Siki? Who is he? Just the 1922 world heavyweight champion, the first African to conquer the belt by atomizing Georges Carpentier, national hero when he, war cross and promoted adjutant on the battlefield of 14-18, was only doomed to mockery and condescension. Double bass player Mauro Gargano has chosen this hero. A hero with a transatlantic fate, just like the sextet in this image: drummer Jeff Ballard, who takes swings like no one else, and trumpeter Jason Palmer, who constantly reminds his playing that Miles Davis was a glove aficionado ("Jumping with Siki ”), are there to remind him. A hell of a life as that of this boxer, whose footsteps from Saint-Louis have been followed all the way to New York where he will be killed in circumstances that suggest some settling of scores with the underworld. A movie hero who wouldn't have a movie, because Hollywood got hold of Mohamed Ali and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter and France, Marcel Cerdan [2]… but Battling Siki, nobody. Mauro Gargano's sequel tackles this task, where Manu Codjia's guitar and Bojan Z's keyboards are alternately lyrical and pugnacious narrators of this life of jousting. "Round 1: Saint-Louis" is a perfect example of that, swollen with scuffed blues and sudden acceleration. Gargano knows boxing from the side of the ring where you take the punches, it shows in his game while dodging and slamming strings on the wood of his double bass. He also knows jazz, it is obvious that there is no need to reiterate; it turns out that the two have always been linked, both in aesthetics and in the collective imagination. It is thanks to this closeness that he conducts his orchestra like a champion on a match night: Ricardo Izquierdo's reeds and Palmer's trumpet are assigned breaks and feints. With the electricity of Codjia and Bojan Z the power, at the rhythmic basis the endurance of the bumping machine. We follow Siki as privileged spectators, like through a handheld camera eyepiece. The specific climates of each city, of each station as one would say of a splendid ordeal, give this disc a biopic look where only the images are missing. The use of spoken scenes, performed by Frédéric Pierrot (Siki's coach) and Adama Adepoju (Siki), as well as certain period sound systems, adds to this impression. Gargano's choice to place the stake of his words in the fundamentally dialectical relationship between the coach and the boxer - of the master and the slave, in the background - make the Suite For Battling Siki a fundamentally political work, in addition to be a magnificent record.

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