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  Bloomington (Indiana), USA - Paris-based Tunisian musician
Smadj
has a new album,
Take It & Drive, on Rasa Music. He uses sequencers, samplers,
synthesizers, and a laptop (portable) computer.
“All the electronics on the album are the fruit of live improvisation,”
explains
Smadj,
whose birth name is Jean-Pierre Smadja. “I take my personal library of
samples and sounds and play them live. I spent three years exploring this and
found that you can play the laptop just like any other instrument.”
All of the tracks on
Take It & Drive originated as live performances, either on stage or
in
Smadj ’s home studio. “It is not like the last generation of electronic
music where you sequence different sections and re-arrange it to compose the
song,” says Smadj. “Now it is improvised live.”
The album’s ten tracks (plus two remixes) were selected from over thirty
compositions Smadj created over three years. Some of the songs are boiled down
from twenty-minute live jams. After editing the songs down,
Smadj
then added acoustic instruments—including his own evocative performance on the
ud—and invited guests. You can hear references to his prior affair—titled DuOud—in
which a pair of uds were joined with electronica. Smadj plays acoustic guitar
and ud himself on some tracks but enlists a range of stellar guests to
participate in the experiment.
Asian Underground heavyweight
Talvin Singh and Ekova frontwoman Deirdre Dubois appear on ‘Vogue.’ Amit
Chatterjee, the singular Indian vocalist and guitarist of
Joe
Zawinul fame, and Mehdi Haddab, who partners Smadj in the duo DuOud,
team up on ‘Drive.’
Malian singer
Rokia
Traore appears on two songs as well as both of the remixes. “I really
wanted Rokia,” exclaims
Smadj.
“Her voice is really, really innovative, really modern. She is very
successful because of her quest to be modern within this kind of African
singing. And I think she sings a lot more modern on ‘He Said’ than she sings
even on her own albums.”
“On ‘Fatwords,’ her singing is more Malian traditional,” continues
Smadj.
“But I wanted the marriage of that African singing with the ud, the Turkish
ney (flute), and all these Oriental [Middle Eastern] scales. African singers
really improvise with their voice, like nobody on earth. They have all these
memories of stories of families that they could use. That’s what Rokia did: she
came to my studio and heard one or two things from these songs and she
improvised on them; really quickly with simple stories that she has known for
ever. We have the same thing with Oriental musicians, but with instrumental
music, not with singing. We use plenty of old, old songs and share quickly with
other musicians. So Rokia and I could find a playing field where we could
improvise together easily.”
The Bushmen of Kalahari appear on ‘Meeting with the Bushmen’ thanks to an
invitation to remix their music live. “I prepared several beats for them in
advance,” recalls
Smadj.
“But it was really hard for them to be inside these beats. It was too strange
for them. So I decided to begin with one of their own melodies. I told them ‘We
will start from you.’ I noticed this particular singing style so I sampled that
and also the special rhythm associated with the singing. It’s not exactly 6/8.
It’s really something from them. It was an important meeting for me.”
The tongue-in-cheek song title ‘C’est comme ci c’était fait…’ comes from a
French expression. “Whenever a DJ puts French spoken word into their
recording, people in the UK always say, ‘It’s nice! It has a great French Touch!’”
explains
Smadj.
“So I am kind of making fun of that on this song. I asked Dom Farkas—who is
an actor, but is also known for his kind of pornographic, live poetry and
music—to play the part of the radio DJ in this song. When a woman calls up the
radio station to make her song request, the DJ replies with this French
expression: ‘I have just done it…’ like he has already filled her request faster
than she has asked.”
The album begins and ends with something more personal: songs named for
Smadj’s
daughter and son, respectively. “They have inspired me a lot,” says
Smadj.
“Because of where I was in my life, these two songs are really melancholic. I
put my heart into it. I play long oud solos. It was what I was going through at
the time… a little bit of sadness. But people tell me there is plenty of love in
these two songs, because it is about my children.”
In the end, through all of the filtering and editing, the album clocks in at one
hour. “It’s perfect if you have a one hour drive that you just want to get
through,”
Smadj
chuckles. “You put that in on a long road and it will accompany you really
nicely.”
Buy the CD:
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