how beautiful is the music we don’t hear

Montreux – Somewhat like those actresses who say they started their careers by chance because they accompanied a friend to auditions, I turned up at the Montreux Festival to see Norah Jones and Mavis Staples, and went on to put someone else’s music in their ears, demonstrating that a lot of the best songs and voices capable of shaking you to the core remain buried under that unbreakable shell called habit, on the radio and in playlists: ours and joe’s. choose for us.

On the Jazz Lab’s tiny stage, MEGA, Jacob Banks and the Tesky Brothers performed – on the same evening, one after the other – names that mean little or nothing even to most insiders. The first, Mega, shares a stage name with five other musicians, has no Wikipedia page, but is on Spotify. I know the first two because later I looked up some more information about him (without finding them, for example his age), I know the third because he tried to repeat it from one passage to another, with electrified air. Didn’t do anything else. Someone who could say one good thing in the midst of so many people. When in doubt, next to the guitarist (the only person to accompany him on stage, and you wonder “but will it be enough?” It was enough), he held up one of those signs with the movable letters , which you can buy for a few francs at Ikea in which he wrote his name and Instagram contact.

a voice that takes you far away

Mega is her name, and Mega is a slim, distinctly shy English girl of Ugandan descent, with an effortless class and a voice that lifts you up. He says he is inspired by Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill, not only to fly low, but also from India. Aerie (recommendation: ‘Back to the Middle’) and Chaka Khan (the one from the original version of ‘I’m Every Woman’). When she started singing, even the most distracted person on the bar counter turned to her, when shortly afterwards she sang her only real hit (she hasn’t even released a full album yet, but only singles and EPs). ), ‘Rath’, they (we were) were all hoping it would never end, for the voices, and the hypnotic rhythms of the guitars.

In other songs, such as ‘All Day Long’ and ‘Box of Regrets’, seeds of African music sprout here and there. When she comes out, excited, who doesn’t know whether to quit or repeat, she certifies an air that shouldn’t be there, which is also true. Mega replaced at the last minute Joey Oladukone, the opening act for Tesky Brothers’ concerts.

new sound of motown

When it’s time for Jacob Banks, the voices get louder from the stage. Also British, but born in Nigeria (where she also lived during the early years of her life), Banks has exactly the voice that even the laziest listeners – always flipping through the same records in their hands – long for without knowing it. It’s already here and it’s on the concert stage where young people go (who, among other things, don’t constantly keep their cell phones on stage, compared to the much older audience of Jones and Staples ), those whom many try to present as people who do not understand anything about music.

©FFJM 2023, Emilian Itim
Jacob Banks

In Banks’ voice, all that tradition of black music is repeated in a modern key, where the drums play (but not always) and the guitars allow themselves to cross four or five different styles with sounds that Doesn’t come from real devices. , Banks would have had the sound of Motown if the Detroit record company had been founded not in the sixties, but in the new millennium. There are voices from Ray Charles, James Brown and BB King. It limits everyone, but does not copy anyone. There are even those among black voices today who compare him to Gregory Porter (but he’s a porter in Pinafore) and Leon Bridges (one from ‘River’ and ‘Coming Home’, another phenomenon) who, though with less work Let’s do the dirty. Banks on the other hand is a fan of Kanye West, not just the Holy Monsters of the Golden Age. The analogy game sucks when it starts with the chorus of ‘Unknown (To You)’, the same goes for ‘Chainsmoking’ and ‘Unholy War’. The style has done the rest with a bright green sleeveless shirt with ‘ice cream’ written in red on it. Sometimes the music comes crashing down when you least expect it, adding a stark contrast to the more classic ‘Black’ sound. And he too replaces foggy screams with the tenderness of a song dedicated to his dead grandmother. When he greets, he sends small secular blessings that go on and on, as if he is sending us something from his hands, one by one.

leap into the past

The Tesky Brothers are Australians, originally two brothers Josh and Sam, who grew up on a farm outside Melbourne. He recorded his records on an old 24-track recorder because it “sounds better”. Their ‘Pain and Misery’ seems to come from a raucous seventies radio, their record covers too, and some of them too, in a superband version, with two women playing horns, accompanied by a bassist Is. A porn actor and singer from years of censorship, Josh’s style and moustache, which looks like a hybrid between Dawson’s Creek’s Dawson and Kurt Cobain, have been forbidden from turning up the volume too high. Each piece is a blast from the past, but written today: James Taylor, Buffalo Springfield, Otis Redding again.

His ‘Take My Heart’, ‘Crying Shame’ and ‘Carry You’ are worthy successors to a tradition that veers from country to folk, from blues to soul, smelling of a village fiesta, but country with great taste Did.

©_FFJM 2023, Marc Ducrest
Tesky Brothers

And then, as you watch the evening pass by without much effort, you think of a sentence that — before it was plastered across motivational social bulletin boards — made sense: “How much do you have to do something the first time you do it?” Is it time?” And our attachment to the music of our twenties that was “always better” deserves a mirror question: “When will it be the last time we hear something”? Of course, thanking it, but then putting it aside, eventually devoting itself to something else. Which is plenty, just go and seek it out.