The musician went to the equatorial forest for two months with percussionist Rémi Leclerc. There she discovered the culture of the Aka Pygmies, thanks to which she delivers a unique spectacle.
Jazz woman, cosmopolitan and fervent follower of musical travels, the singer Leïla Martial returns to the Estive with her new project, “Aka / free voices of forest”. The creation was born from her meeting with the Aka Pygmies, whose songs she learned during a trip to the Congo, in the equatorial forest for two months, with Rémi Leclerc, body percussionist musician.
The Aka live in the forests of northern Congo-Brazzaville and southern Central Africa. Preserving their way of life and their culture, despite the modernity that is gradually invading their daily lives, has become a real struggle.
At the heart of everything, the forest. Taking care of it is vital because it is the source of everyday life. And the forest is also a place where music resonates particularly. All the Aka are musicians and in their voices, mingle in an intertwining, where the timbres make heard all the subtleties of the yodel. Because contrapuntal polyphony is a true art of living, ordinary for the Aka, spectacular for those who discover it, due to the surprising changes of register that it deploys. Similarly, the musical instruments that accompany this singular song (harp, musical bow, flute) are the champions of an extremely rich culture that Leïla Martial has taken to heart to highlight through this new show, whose challenge is the encounter with all that is beautiful and human.
The confrontation of these musical universes, both different and close in their freedom, has led artists to invent a new, common one. During their trip, Leïla Martial and Rémi Leclerc completely immersed themselves in the world of the forest, an exceptional time of residence from which was born the creation, but also a record and a documentary.
What you will have the opportunity to discover at the Estive is a concert filled with emotion, which bears witness to this unprecedented artistic encounter. On stage, two percussionists and three Aka singers, a European vocalist, a singing body-percussionist and a vocal bassist. Enriched with diverse and organic cultures, polyphony then becomes a complete musical body. More than anything, it is the voice that tells the music, a voice that far from the words or the stories told, expresses all the emotion of a Story that the bodies, vibrations and vocal cords transmit. It is a spiritual experience to which this concert invites us. Beyond the music, polyphony brings us to live the world in another way, to open up to the sensitive, to let ourselves be crossed by rhythms that play with our emotions and our old self.
Leïla Martial
Sensitive to life and its beauty and very concerned with ecological issues, the singer and musician campaigns for an ecology of living music and her current work is oriented towards practical proposals, inviting music actors to transform their practices in order to make them compatible with safeguarding species and the ecosystem. For her, “it’s time to change the model (…) and imagine a living art that is also an art of the living.” Recognized by the Victoires du jazz in 2020, which made her the vocal artist of the year, she has a string of projects, whether in terms of shows with the Aka / Free voices of forest project or work on the writing of a solo, Euphrosys, will be released in March 2023.
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