(Vocal Jazz, Ethnic Jazz, World Fusion, NO FORMAT!) Julia Sarr & Patrice Larose (ft Youssou N'Dour, Leity M'Baye) - Set Luna - 2005, MP3, 320 kbps

One of the most original vocal artists to emerge from West Africa in decades, mezzo soprano Julia Sarr honed her reputation as an A-list backing vocalist in Paris for luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Goldmann, Michel Fugain, Johnny Hallyday, Julio Iglesias, MC Solaar, and Youssou N’Dour, having launched it all (closer to West Africa’s polyrhythmic signatures) with live gigs with Fela Kuti’s rhythmic alter ego, the legendary Nigerian Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, and with Congolese singer Lokua Kanza. Her a cappella solos graced Jean-Claude Petit’s score for the film Lumumba.
Nurturing her solo aspirations and songwriting quietly for years, Sarr has found in Patrice Larose, the flamenco-influenced guitarist, just the right partner, as French critic Stéphane Ollivier has said, “with whom to merge haunting individualities, stories, and traditions.” For all of the richness of the respective traditions in which Sarr and Larose find their anchors, the Sarr-Larose duo is more a flowing conversation between individuals than a studied hybrid of styles, and it is precisely this conversational quality which elevates the partnership far above the often murky waters of the mere encounter of musical forms.
“Flamenco and Senegalese music appear on our record, but as shadowy rather than dominant presences, as cultural imprints which Julia and I could never undo within our musical selves, which it would have been useless to try to erase,” says Larose. “Our music has taken form little by little, and it really can’t be defined in terms of geography.”
“When Camarón and Paco de Lucia play together,” Larose further explains, “you really are hearing two parallel songs. Flamenco is a music of counterpoint, and this is how Julia and I composed our songs together: Julia’s voice and my guitar pose questions to each other, and answer each other. My tastes naturally incline toward music in which the lyrics and the music are enlaced in one another, whether it be in the classical composers or in, say, people like João Gilberto or João Bosco. With them, the idea of putting voice and guitar in balance is really taken very far: one never knows which element is going to take over. It’s very beautiful and yet unsettling, and this is just what Julia and I have tried to produce.”
The duo’s first album, Set Luna (So I’ve Observed, in Wolof), and their American debut at Carnegie Hall, have been hailed as scarcely like anything else ever produced from the inexhaustibly rich Senegalese vocal tradition of which the Wolof-speaking Sarr is a part. Dubbed by their Carnegie Hall patron, Youssou N’Dour, as “the fresh face of African music”, and by The New York Times as a new source of “introspection” in a revitalized African tradition, Julia Sarr and Patrice Larose combine virtuosity with noble retinue, their exuberance tempered by a graceful restraint. Le Monde, the French paper of record, citing Sarr’s “beguiling sweetness” and the “perfection” of her timbre and timing, has said that Sarr and Larose “share a similar capacity for venturing beyond the usual borders, a disdain for established codes, for stagnant templates, for rectilinear pathways.”
With both a buoyant cheer and a knowing realism, several of Sarr’s songs evoke a nostalgia for her native Senegal, where, in the hardscrabble Dakar suburbs where she grew up, Sarr says she listened to “all sorts of music, from salsa to soul music, from griots to gospel, and even the music of Bollywood.” She sings of the sensory experiences of her childhood, but also, among other themes, of a love for her own child, and of a love for someone “who has not arrived yet” in her life. In the album’s poignant title track “Set Luna Djamanodji”, Sarr offers a cautionary tale for immigrants who will face, as she has, Northern weather, inevitable money problems, and, worst of all, the dreadful feeling of invisibility: "It’s a letter addressed to someone who wanted to come to live in France as I’ve done," explains the singer. "I tell him that here you can become transparent. Alone with your suitcase on the subway train platform, it’s possible that no one may see you, no one may speak to you."
Throughout the album Set Luna, and in the warm engagement with her audiences which marks her stagecraft, Julia Sarr modestly exults in her femininity, her songs remaining half-hidden, as veiled treasures, in a state of anticipation, enveloped by reserve, which Romain Gary said is “to a woman’s voice what grace is to the body.”
The Sarr-Larose duo – it would be criminal to attempt to pigeonhole them into any facile world-music category – has opened one of the most novel musical dialogues to have emerged – in any country, in any tradition – in a great while. They could be the great musical revelation of the year.
-- Thomas Rome
http://www.eyefortalent.com

Julia Sarr, born in Dakar, Senegal, but who has lived in France for twenty-five years now, is a contemporary young woman: an African in Paris whose curiosity towards others remains anchored in her ancestral culture – she's of Wolof descent –, she remains open to the world and all its metamorphoses and perpetual crossbreeding. A singer with a clear timbre, she owes her faultless technique, and her voice's exceptional power of emotion, to her numerous participations over the years in projects related not only to African music (from Oumou Sangare to Papa Wemba, Miriam Makeba, Youssou N’Dour or Koffi Olomide), but also to French popular music (MC Solaar, J.J. Goldman, Johnny Hallyday or Michel Fugain). Her ten-year association with Congo singer Lokua Kanza, has been an impressive partnership, one that has given direction to her career.
A collaboration between a Senegalese-French chanteuse and a Spanish-French guitarist may seem unlikely at face value, but the two actually have quite a bit in common. Both traditions share North African roots -- Senegal through its centuries-old link with Islam and Spain via an indelible Moorish tinge that still permeates the nation’s culture despite the medieval re-conquest of Granada. Patrice Larose’s playing is neat-fingered and unassuming yet rhythmically unfettered, his round-toned, slightly buzzy acoustic guitar makes quicksilver runs between melodic contexts, time-signatures and ports of call. Julia Sarr’s silky vocals, while true to her ancestry, are hard to pigeon-hole; she is obviously an open-eared world citizen whose musical vocabulary reflects a life-long immersion in everything from R&B ballads to West African praise-singing. The duo hardly breaks a sweat while shifting between Brazilian bossa nova, French chanson, Spanish flamenco and the mbalax invented by Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, who sits in on the title track and was the force behind their 2005 Carnegie Hall debut. The album is relaxed and lushly beautiful -- one of those rare must-haves that will never disappoint or grow stale. --Christina Roden