All Is Forbidden Listening Post 184. She stares from the album cover—stark, vulnerable, penetrating. From outside, Ann O’aro’s life may seem in search of a metaphor, a verbal contrivance to make it sound less horrifying, but she’s beyond that. As a child, she played...
Little Big World Listening Post 180. Think global, act local. The mantra applies to government planning, the environment and business, but it’s also a defining feature of music—and few artists active today have embodied the concept longer than the French-Spanish...
Ordinary People Listening Post 174. Gavroche, Eleanor Rigby, Lili Marlene—evocative characters of literature and song are often everyday people in uncommon circumstances or described in illuminating context. When it comes to finely detailed portraits and scenes, the...
Making Waves Listening Post 172. It’s easy to exaggerate a kindred connection between two people from the same city, even if they were born 150 years apart. But consider: Jules Verne, who grew up in Nantes, certainly knew that nature can send a wave thousands of miles...
Arc de Triomphe Listening Post 168. She has the look of today’s youth—pierced, tattooed, androgynous—and the soul of romantic poets through the ages. She blends her music but refuses to blend herself, or calibrate her career arc according to market forces. And therein...
Sea Changes Listening Post 167. Every sea is a timeless highway of hope and sorrow, and Dafné Kritharas has combed the Aegean for telltale echoes. Though focused on tides from the 1920s and 1930s, her crosscurrents run deeper: In 1492, the multicultural Ottoman Empire...
Convergence & Co-existence Listening Post 160. Like most urban settlements, Lyon began with people and currents from other places—Roman refugees camped at the confluence of the Saône and Rhône rivers. For two millennia the rivers have framed the city’s heart and...
Eleanor’s Daughters Listening Post 159. Occitan, mother tongue of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart, had a literary golden age in the 12th century and produced the great singer-songwriters of the Middle Ages, the troubadours and trobarises. It was still...
True Lies Listening Post 157. Florent Nouvel has a child’s sense of wonder and a director’s flair for composition. He simultaneously reveals and fabricates—his Facebook bio describes him as “le plus grand chanteur” of France (6 feet, 6 inches, or 1.99m)—and in...
Echoes of Time Listening Post 145. If Early Music transports us to medieval times, then Georgian polyphony, stretching back more than 1,600 years, is communal song in primeval form. UNESCO declared this tradition an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and, like...
Nuance in Paradise Listening Post 144. A Google search of literature featuring Tahiti turns up novels by 46 authors, only one of whom is Tahitian: Most of what the world knows about the fabled island is filtered through foreign eyes. The singer-songwriter Vaiteani...
Good Vibrations Listening Post 143. Bondeko, the work of three prodigiously gifted artists who mix voices and compositions to produce a dreamy, multi-layered sound, is a transcendent microcosm of the musical diversity of Africa and its Diaspora. The...
On the Street Where You Sing Listening Post 141. There’s a vein of Pygmalion to Eskelina Svanstein’s career in French chanson—just substitute divergent nationalities for social classes and allot more harmony to the goals of student and teachers. The story opens with a...
It Takes a Village Listening Post 140. The concept of Bab El West’s first full-length album was born in Brittany when Habib Farroukh spotted a road sign for the town of Douarnenez. The Moroccan-born singer-composer and two French-born band mates compared notes and...
Trading Voices Listening Post 122. How many goals can one album achieve? Idir, the soft but steadfast voice of Berber/Kabyle culture, may not have posed that question when he conceived Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere), but a partial list would include putting his...
Griot-politics Listening Post 117. It’s unlikely Donald Trump has heard Kanazoé Orkestra’s stirring debut album, but when he told a group of African leaders that he has many friends “going to your countries, trying to get rich,” he unwittingly validated the...
Perchance to Dream Without Sleep Listening Post 101. She is innocent and wise, a nomad and a poet, an alchemist of styles whose music is more colorful than the sum of its parts. Flavia Coelho, a girl from the slums of Rio de Janeiro who sang in the Paris Métro...
Swings So Cool, Sways So Gently Listening Post 98. When bossa nova swept the world, no country was more receptive than France. Marcel Camus’ Oscar-winning film Black Orpheus—music by Tom Jobim and Luiz Bonfá—channeled the Brazilian wave to new audiences. French...
Souls of Their Street Listening Post 91. You won’t soon forget the three artists of Sous les Quais. Frédéric Flouret (deep vocals, guitar), Romain Jamard (an accordion he calls his “third lung”) and Benoît Grelier (sonorous cello) offer street corner French...
Mise-en-Seine Listening Post 84. Long one of France’s most popular bands, Karpatt—singer-songwriter Fred Rollat, guitarist Gaëtan Lerat and bassist Hervé Jegousso—paints scenes of life’s adventure and grind, using an intoxicating mix of Gypsy jazz and French chanson,...
All in the Family Listening Post 70. Marijosé Alie is a journalist, author and singer-songwriter. Her daughter Fred is a painter with a background in architecture—and a singer-songwriter; younger daughter Sohée is an actress, dancer—and singer-songwriter. After years...
Remastered Poetry Listening Post 62. Dylan and Marley, Fela Kuti and Ramy Essam— musicians can move the world. Likewise Souad Massi, Algeria’s greatest female singer, who grew up on American music, relocated to France following death threats earned in a political rock...
Wave Back Listening Post 61. The key track of Clio’s eponymous debut album is Éric Rohmer est mort (Eric Rohmer Is Dead), a tribute to the New Wave director, who died in 2010: “I want more of him,” she laments, “of those lovers on suburban trains/Of Parisian squares...
French Fried Listening Post 52. When Sophie Tapie appeared on The Voice/France she wanted to perform songs by Johnny Cash but bowed to warnings of how French viewers might vote; she did Bruno Mars and Johnny Hallyday instead. Lesson learned, when the time came to...
Music Man Listening Post 47. Joël Jaccoulet is a producer, arranger, songwriter and musician who has a passion for the sounds of his own culture but doesn’t hesitate to mix styles—for what is Créole if not a blend? On Créole Pop he assembles an extraordinary...
Just This Once Listening Post 46. Amonafi (Once Upon a Time) is a collection of stories by a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter. Born in Mauritania, raised in Senegal and transplanted to France, Daby Touré has fashioned the strands...
Floating to the Top Listening Post 42. The second album by Jérémy Frérot and Florian Delavega explores and floats between innocence and experience, dream and reality, yesterday and today—and, as the title indicates, shadow and light. Just a year after their...
C’est la Vie Listening Post 35. Throughout his 40-year career, Francis Cabrel—the greatest French singer-songwriter of his generation—has woven strands of folk, blues, jazz, rock and pop into iconic songs of relationships, protest and social commentary. On his 13th...
Island Cadence Listening Post 30. Zouk emerged in Guadeloupe and Martinique as a carnival-beat music style, but in recent years it has taken on a more sensual cadence, conducive to slower dancing and love songs. It has also transcended its Caribbean origins,...
Alchemy on the Seine Listening Post 28. When a singer is gutsy enough to do an album of classic Paris chansons—even someone like Zaz (Isabelle Geffroy), with two hit records behind her—you can bet the army of Paris-lovers will be ready to pass judgment. Verdict:...
