Yacine Boulares struck up a conversation with a fellow
Francophone musician at a jazz club late one night. It changed his life.
The multi-reed player made what he jokingly calls “math
music,” the intellectual jazz savored by the few, when not working as a sideman
and session player for the likes of Placido Domingo and Tabou Combo. But after
he met drummer Jojo Kuo, the avuncular, genial Cameroonian successor to Tony
Allen in Fela Kuti’s band, Boulares found himself captivated by a new set of
rules: Play for dancers, put the groove first, connect with the heart. Kuo took
the Parisian transplant under his wing, inviting Boulares to jam at late-night
sessions and then become a regular member of his band.
“There’s a pocket to this music, that is natural to
Cameroonian players,” Boulares explains. “When you’re playing with them, it’s
like sitting on the nose of a jet. There is drive that can push the whole band.
That’s the magic. When they play, everyone locks.”
From the locking intersection of heart and head, of groove
and crystalline structure, flowed Ajoyo (Ropeadope; release: April 21, 2015), a
high-flying hybrid of jazz, traditional dance rhythms from Cameroon, and just a
touch of Afrobeat. Inspired by the sounds of Kuo’s native land, Boulares
crafted original pieces of thought-provoking party music. Then he recruited a
diverse crew of African, Afro-diasporic, and cross-cultural crack musicians to
find the pocket.
The ecstatic “Chocot” brings the Cameroonian bikutsi drive
to bear, giving Boulares’s soprano sax free rein to rage. “Tashikere” shimmies,
as vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles’s voice leaps joyfully over complex bursts
of horns. “Benskin” effortlessly combines the polyrhythms and polyphony of the
best African dance music with a serious penchant for jazz depth and reflection.
It’s danceable philosophy, in the perfect pocket.
Boulares came late to jazz, but rapidly made up for lost
time. With heritage in Tunisia, but raised in Paris, Boulares hails from a
family without any particular musical inclination, though Boulares’s father
often listened to Arabic classical music like Oum Khulthum. He gave his son a sax as a graduation
present, but Boulares didn’t pick up the saxophone before college years. While
studying for his MA, Boulares went from exploring the philosophical concepts
behind musical expression and experience at the Sorbonne to playing music
himself.
At the same time, Boulares was coming to terms with his own
identity, as a young Parisian who was utterly French, yet who stood out the
moment he said his name. “It was a challenge for me to understand my Arabic
heritage,” remembers Boulares. He spent summers in Tunisia, and his experiences
spurred him to study Arabic and decolonize his heritage. Boulares’s roots and
his connection to his own African identity runs through “Houb Ouna,” a piece
that combines Tunisian rhythms with sub-Saharan elements, tracing the path of
slaves and migrants from the south to the north.
Boulares’s love of jazz took him west on a Fulbright to New
York, and to that fateful night at Fat Cat. After several years, now part of a
growing circle of Cameroonian, Ivorian, and other Francophone African projects,
Boulares began composing his own pieces based on West African rhythms, to give
the bands he played with more material. Kuo encouraged him, and when the
drummer left New York, he insisted Boulares continue the work.
He did, gathering a trusted crew of friends around him,
blending Afro-diasporas (from Cameroonian bassist Fred Doumbe to New Orleans
native Linton Smith on the trumpet +barbadian percussionist Foluso Mimy ) and
savvy young cross-cultural players (Guilhem Flouzat on drums, Israeli-born Alon
Albagli on guitar, and Turkish-German keys player Can Olgun). He tapped Sarah
Elizabeth Charles for her spot-on velvet voice, and for her ability to help
crystallize Boulares’s intensely felt lyrical ideas. Working with producer
Jacques Schwarz-Bart, who has played sax with everyone from Roy Hargrove to D’Angelo,
Boulares let the band loose, finding new spaces for the musicians to move and
expand.
It was the last step away from the math music, a next step
toward an increasingly nuanced (and funky) understanding of his own origins. It
brought to the fore some advice Boulares recalls from one of his early mentors:
“Music exists before you and after you. You’re a vector, a door, and you have
to be the widest door you can. Let it go through you.” That wide open moment
points straight to the pocket.
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