señor stef
Wow, that blend of styles never existed before & created something completely new. Every tag would need a "post" in front...I feel orientalistic psychedelic, the funk of afrobeat, the jazzy excess, the simplicity of punk, a spiritual trance & what would be our generations opera!
All songs work their own way to the sublime. And when the horns set in halfway through Quetzalcoatl you now that they perform outstandingly!
sunlightandgreaves
Beautiful perspectives from the Sicilian diaspora. Autochthonous sounds, melodies, and sentiment that is both outward and in-looking. Lovely stuff :)
Favorite track: Chi ci Talia ?.
Includes unlimited streaming of Luci e Guai
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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Includes unlimited streaming of Luci e Guai
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Streaming + Download
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Crimi is all about the soul that flows, the kind of groove that oozes the sticky funk of New Orleans and the influences of Algerian raï, not forgetting the less upbeat, more melancholic passages.
Crimi is above all a personal story: that of a kid growing up in Lyon whose Sicilian grandmother hummed tunes from times gone by. This is how the saxophonist and singer Julien Lesuisse fertilises found his groove, which he likes to call Sicilian soul. It is also unsurprising to hear oriental styles here, a lyricism in full bloom that
references Lesuissefertilises’ trips to Oran with Mazalda.
Crimi is a desire to revive tradition through original songs, strong melodies carried by a collective sound that resists the confines of labeling. The result is a trad-modern soundtrack, which is both very structured and very free at the same time.
Right now, Crimi is Luci e guai, the first album to be released by Airfono in April 2021. The track, ‘Light and confusion’, has a procedural quality and seems to say that nothing is ever as simple as it seems, in language as well as in music. In other words, this song is the perfect way to weave together all the threads that make up the complexity of a personality, from jazz to song, from the day before yesterday to tomorrow, from here to elsewhere....more
Ué!
Amici !
Ma picchi nun mi viniti a pigghiari ?
Amuri amuri quantu si luntanu
Cu ti lu cunza lu lettu a la sira
Cu ti lu cunza nun lu sa cunzari
Malateddu ti levi a la mattina
Malateddu ti levi a la mattina
O mano mano d'oro
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano d'oro
Ven'e me pigghia
O puramenti la frebe lu taglia com'u ferru filatu a la tinaglia
O mano mano d'oru
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano d'oru
Ven'e me pigghia
Vuliva jiri unni va la negghia
Ti viu lu capeddhu unni travagghia
Ti viu se ti bolli lassi o pigghia
O puramenti la frebe lo taglia com'u ferru filatu a la tinaglia
O mano mano d'oru
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano d'oru
Ven'e me pigghia
O puramenti la frebe lo taglia com'u ferru filatu a la tinaglia
O mano mano d'oru
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano d'oru
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano
O mano d'oro o mano d'oro
Mano mano mano d'oro
mano mano mano d'oro
O mano O mano d'oro
O mano O mano d'oro O mano O mano d'oro
O mano O mano d'oro
O mano
O mano d'oro
O mano O mano d'oro
O mano d'oro
O mano mano d'oro
Amuri mio si luntano
O mano mano d'oro Cyril
O mano mano d'oro Bruno
O mano mano d'oro Mathieu
O mano mano d'oro
O mano mano d'oro
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano d'oro
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano mano d'oro
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano mano d'oro
Ven'e me pigghia
O mano mano mano d'oro amuri
O mano mano d'oro amuri
Amici
O mano mano mano d'oro ven'e me pigghia
'Nu vasu chinu di duluri
Nun ti vogghiu rarri
Nun dovresti avvicinari
Chidda vucca senza labbru
O no
Nun si viddi cosa sugnu ?
Orva, pigghia la fugga !
'Nu vasu chinu di duluri
Nent'autru ti pozzu rarri
Nent'autru
Stu mussu chinu di duluri
Stu mussu di velenu
No ! nun m'avvicinari
No nun m'avvicinari
'Nu vasu chinu di duluri
Nun ti vogghiu rarri
Nun dovresti avvicinari
Chidda vucca senza labbru
No no
Stu mussu chinu di duluri
Stu mussu di velenu
No ! nun m'avvicinari
No nun m'avvicinari
Ué ! aquila mia
Nel cielo, cosa ti puo turbare ?
Ieri ho visto una figliola
Come 'nu pesce si muoveva
M'ha sembrato che
E andata col'disc jockey
On their debut album Luci E Guai, French four-piece Crimi dissolve the borders between genres, cultures and nations, with an eight-song serving of diasporic groove. The brainchild of Julien Lesuisse, a saxophonist with some two decades’ grounding in the French music scene, Crimi stitch up a wealth of regional styles: from Algerian raï to hard New Orleans funk, Afrobeat to Sicilian folk balladry, in their hands it all sounds so natural you won’t be able to find the join.
Formed in 2018, Crimi finds Julien collaborating with a brand new trio of musicians. However it is the singer & sax player’s past ventures that combine to explain how he hit on this sound. Mazalda, from Lyon, have existed since 2002, evolving from jazzy pop oddballs into a drum-heavy live dance party with their own fifty-speaker travelling Soundsystem, the ‘Turbo Clap Station’. In recent years, they branched out into raï – first meeting Algerian singer Cheb Lakhdar and backing him in a series of concerts, and later recording an album, El Ndjoum, with Sofiane Saidi, a star of raï’s new electro-wave who’s also featured with Parisian duo Acid Arab. (Mazalda and Sofiane proved their mettle by playing the Algerian city of Oran, raï’s spiritual home, in early 2020.)
During this period, Julien also performed in La Squadra Zeus – from the Alpine town of Chambéry but dedicated to the traditional folk styles of southern Italy, nearly 2,000 km away. Playing Sicilian flute and Calabrian bagpipes in the trio, Julien learned so much about this music and its relationship to the region’s culture – including, ultimately, the realisation that he wasn’t cut out to play these trad arrangements in straight fashion. No drama: the musician envisaged potential new soundclashes, and the first stirrings of what became Crimi were in his rewirings of three traditional Sicilian songs which appear on Luci e Guai.
Mano D’Oro, the first single from the album and its opening song, is a perfect example of the Crimi worldview. Based on an old standard from
Sicily, Julien added some lyrics but preserved the subject matter: young and poor Sicilians moving to northern Europe seeking work. Two generations of Julien’s family arrived in France this way. In the hands of this quartet – Julien plus Cyril Moulas, Mathieu Felix (since replaced
by Brice Berrerd) and Bruno Duval on guitar, bass and drums respectively – it’s transformed into something electric and slinky, opening with a
bassline plucked from the funkiest bars of the Maghreb.
La Vicaria and La Virrinedda, the other two Sicilian-origin cuts on Luci e Guai, ramp up the folk-funk-raï intermingling, Cyril peeling off a wicked jazz guitar solo on the former and a tender, lyrical sax section lighting up the latter. With its lamentations of jailhouse life, Julien imagined La Vicaria being sung by Cheb Khaled, controversial raï icon from Oran. All three have been recorded by the late Rosa Balistreri, a cult Sicilian folk singer in her 60s/70s heyday and one of Julien’s biggest musical influences on Crimi – alongside the Algerian cheikhates from the mid-20th century on. Female singers like Cheikha Rimitti and Cheikha Djenya sang of sex and desire over languid, hypnotic backing, scandalising establishment figures in the process.
Lyrically speaking, the album’s five original compositions are the result of Julien spending two years learning Sicilian – burying his head in three dictionaries, getting to grips with the nuances of the language (it resembles Italian, but it isn’t Italian!) as a poetic medium. As a child in France, Julien heard the language spoken by his mother and grandparents, and could follow a conversation without being able to converse himself – so Luci E Guai finds him making up for lost time as well as approaching the headspace of the cantastorie vocalists he so admires.
Crimi’s other members, variously based in Chambéry and Geneva, are schooled in jazz, funk and rhythm & blues. Cyril also features in the Ethiopian jazz-styled Imperial Tiger Orchestra, while Duval is a disciple of Afrobeat drum king Tony Allen. And it shows, on an album recorded live in the studio and kept as warm and organic as possible. Be the results loping, woodwind-led psychedelic jazz delicacy on Quetzalcoatl, or the stylistically liquid jazz-punk-folk-funk of Ciatu Di Lu Margiu, these guys make quite a unit.
This is music born to be witnessed live, holding a glass of something potent, and lord willing that can happen soon: Crimi played a streamed show for Lyon’s Festival du Péristyle late last year, but Julien acknowledges that ain’t the real deal. They’ve been making a film about the band in the meantime, with French director Tangui Le Cras – and
writing the next Crimi album. May it be released into a world where movement is as free as the sound these four musicians bring to life.
credits
released April 2, 2021
Written and composed by Julien Lesuisse
Publishing: Airfono records
℗ Julien Lesuisse / Airfono Records
Airfono is a label dedicated to original, spectacular, and virtuoso projects with the ambition to
record a mix of
live energy, futuristic grooves, and festive spirit. From jazz to techno, Airfono is a
home for experimentation and musical freedom.
Central place of acoustic instrument is one of the constants of this family which goes from hand made techno to raï or from ambient electro to post-punk....more
My god, what an absolutely incredible Suite. I'll admit, I've struggled to get into Pharoah Sanders due to diving headfirst into some of his most challenging catalogue and that never worked. This is the perfect place to restart. Floating Points is new for me and I can honestly say I've never heard synthesizer music this lush and organic before. the LSO is just perfect. This is one of those albums that any serious music fan needs in their life. The perfect swan song for the great Pharaoh! 5/5 ClassyMusicSnob
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Like so many others, this came like a bolt out of the blue and, even though it's well before payday, I had to have this astonishing album on vinyl to prove it exists. The feel of the tunes makes me feel like the Impressions do, Curtis Mayfield, the big spaces and instinctive horns and stuff drifting in and out. Great grooves and I can see lots of ghosts nodding along to this with big smiles on their faces. At last! Anthony Cottrell