Angel Bat Dawid — clarinets, keyboards, vocals, effects
Magic Malik — flute, vocals
Richard Comte — guitar, vocals
Nick Macri — double bass
Toma Gouband — arranged drum set
Among the world’s oldest musical instruments are the flute and the lithophone, not to mention the voice in all its forms. Among the world’s most “classical” musical instruments are the clarinet and the guitar, but these are also the instruments of so much popular music around the world. They are all here, these instruments, as they are and especially transformed, and also the immense shadow of the double bass, in this quintet or pentacle of maquisards, mavericks of sounds and exclamations and interstitial silences. Deconstructors and reconstructors.
Friday, January 24, Vitrolles. The visit begins, as if Angel Bat Dawid, Richard Comte, Toma Gouband, Nick Macri and Magic Malik have just opened the door to a cabinet of musical curiosities, working with all the forces at work, from Ariadne’s threads yet to be drawn to sewing needles of sound. There are herbariums or flasks of intoxicating or intoxicating melodies, automatons of regulated and deregulated harmonies, horns and shells of rhythms and, of course, lightning stones. Musical instruments can be either scientific instruments or magic wands. And Charlie Jazz, who welcomes us to the Moulin à Jazz, is also called Charlie Free. They warn us. If necessary, they’ll play for 5 hours straight.
Saturday January 25, Simorre. After the concert, it was time to hear Angel Bat Dawid explain to the cooperators of the Bistrot Culturel du Bouche à Oreille, whose cuisine is so tasty, as tasty as the paradise on Earth we promise ourselves, what Cookin’ means for musicians (as in “Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet”, for example). Playful activity is at its peak, the game par excellence that makes everything flow. Spirits spin all over the place, and sometimes pass through bodies. You have to move from stage to stage, from state to state, to reach places you might not otherwise have reached. Everything flows together, and so everything is unleashed.
Sunday January 26, Bayonne. We move on to another bistro, despite the storm warning and the wild boars on the road. And we continue with Miles Davis, very indirectly and very involuntarily, when he “Runs the Voodoo Down”. Bastringue’s furious and generous madmen have opened wide the doors of the Bistrot du Saint-Esprit for The Bridge #2.12, and it’s a thunder of possessed voices, Angel’s, Malik’s, Richard’s, the crowd’s, wrinkling the earth’s crust. That’s all there is to it. Nick and Toma play the game of playing and thwarting everything, of experiencing the heterogeneous to the point of ecstatic tightening, to the long embrace of a propeller-driven whirlwind, and to the point of lightning strikes. There were a few lightning strikes that evening…
Tuesday, January 28, Albi. The five explorers continue to unleash the elements in their path, this time in the brick-red city, in the land of pastel blues, under a slate-gray sky. Just a stone’s throw from the cathedral of Sainte-Cécile, patron saint of musicians, stands another sanctuary of sound: the no less holy Frigo. Behind the altar, the oracle announces the coming storm. The storm and the deluge of sounds and souls. Exultation and collective jubilation. The euphoria is contagious and no being of flesh or ether can resist it. They ended up dancing the night away: The Bridge #2.12 are joined by Eva Supreme on vocals, followed by Roland Ossart on Mélisson.
Wednesday, January 29, Toulouse. At the Théâtre du Hangar, the last act of resistance before the demolition, with the complicity of Un Pavé dans le Jazz. In the midst of a faithful audience ready to be bewitched, The Bridge #2.12 celebrates the high mass (and Magic Malik’s new solar revolution). Liturgy in two acts, sketching out a cartography of spirits. The whole room vibrates with sympathy, right down to the walls and crockery.
Thursday, January 30, Poitiers. After paying tribute to the end of an adventure in Toulouse, the team behind Jazz à Poitiers, now Nage Libre, celebrates a renewal at Confort Moderne with The Bridge #2.12. Proof, if one were needed in these times, that improvised music is still and always working to build zones of resistance and multiply imaginations. The free-swimmers of The Bridge #2.12 move in the great river formed and deformed by its five tributaries, making all the crazies give way in their path.
Friday January 31, Nantes. The country is underwater, and collectively improvised music is, yes, sometimes a roaming, sometimes a wandering (here, tonight, in the Salle Paul Fort above the Pannonica, we slipped during the most decodable sequence from a kind of tenebrous folk-ambient, to renegade funk, to dizzy jazz, each time with indefinite pronouns). First in the procession and mumbling of voices, then in the brush and rubble, finally near the source. Of a spring. Even incoherence doesn’t scare off collectively improvised music, as long as a sense of cohesion remains. The adventure of The Bridge #2.12 continues.
Saturday, February 1, Saint-Claude. It’s off again in the Magik School Bus, as Angel Bat Dawid has christened it, despite the double entendre displayed on the on-board screen: “Don’t let the system distract you from the traffic”. It goes without saying that at the Maison du Peuple, the music goes against the flow. It can accommodate anything, just like the old, ancestral, young workers’ cooperative where we are: general assemblies, universities, libraries, gymnasiums, wine cellars, trade union premises and a labor exchange, warehouses, printing works. But machines take care of machines and minds take care of minds, and between these two planes pass bodies, songs and melodies. Sometimes contraband. One of these melodies attracts Eva Supreme to the stage, helping the music to climb the mountain, to see the other side, to fade away. A knowledgeable member of the audience declares the band members to be members of the Shamanic Party.
Sunday, February 2, Saint-Claude. The idea was first to screen “I am not your Negro”, Raoul Peck’s documentary about the lucid James Baldwin at the time of the consecutive assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Then to hear what Angel Bat Dawid had to say on the subject. It didn’t take long for her to reposition herself, as a black woman rich in her own complexity, and reposition everyone in time and in today’s world. Then it was like a black church in a movie theater. Angel spoke. She said, through and through, passionately and lucidly in turn, what she wanted to say, demonstrating the systemic and symbiotic nature of racism in the white world, whether North American or European. And to teach us to share her discomfort, which should also be ours, our common responsibility. Little did we know that on one of the lower floors of the Maison du Peuple, in the silkscreen workshop, a poster produced here was already attacking, like Baldwin, the deep, paradoxical and perverse causes of racism.
Monday, February 3, Pantin. If chaosmos exists – as James Joyce, Leonora Carrington, Asger Jorn, Félix Guattari and Patrick Chamoiseau have all attested – it’s to this place that we plunged that evening. Edgar Allan Poe’s famous descent into the maelstrom, all of us torn apart listening to The Bridge #2.12, in La Dynamo or the Banlieues Bleues centrifuge. There. Resolutely. There. Deliberately. There. Wonderfully. Right up to the diamond in the rough and the diamond in the cut of Eva Supreme’s voice, still with us: just out of the maelstrom (and just before Think Big’s superbly toned-down friends: Thibault Cellier and Raphaël Quenehen, Ben LaMar Gay and Mike Reed).
Tuesday 4, Paris. The Paris Commune was of the neighborhood, in the neighborhood, in the universe. It even left something other than traces in “memories”: space-time portals, as at the MJC Les Hauts de Belleville. At the end of the day, after several round-table discussions arranged like the small and large mirrors of a navigational instrument (on the theme: “Living the poetic occupation of a living space – Cultural rights – Society – Transmission”), Richard Comte, Toma Gouband, Nick Macri and Magic Malik, with special guest Stéphane Payen on saxophone-shoot, turned the tables. All five of them at first, then more and more, as the jam session attracted musicians and dancers from Paris 8 and elsewhere in the universe, who in turn kept the energy flowing, in search and expression of the present moment, which is never present enough. Present. Of the Art Ensemble. Of the art of living.
Thursday 5th, Brest. It was their last concert, their last calculation of improbability, their last translucent muddling rather than tearing apart, with Angel Bat Dawid (as an inspired heiress of Sidney Bechet – and to know that he had played right here, in this crimson cabaret, at Le Vauban, gave her the shivers), Richard Comte, Nick Macri and Magic Malik. But not Toma Gouband, unavailable for this last date. For this one time only: Ramon Lopez on drums, another Great Hectic of another kind, already scheduled as a second part with Aymeric Avice and Luke Stewart, already crossed in Nantes… Everything overlaps, everything cuts, against a backdrop of starry day, of half-hidden kingdoms. And, thanks to their activities, we have new maps of the sky.
Friday 6th, Brest. To finish (finish? Finish what exactly?), Richard Comte and Magic Malik stayed behind, in front, with the support of Aymeric Avice and Luke Stewart, the whole of Macedonia in fanfare and a few drones from beyond the grave, all the poets or voices that passed by, to distribute the music like prickly good luck charms in a propeller bar: Le Triskell. All this before the police raid for attempting to re-enchant the world.
And then there were all the encounters on the fringe. Full margin. Full heart. Community Engagement. Angel Bat Dawid and Eva Supreme at the Lycée Gustave Eiffel in Gagny; Angel, Magic Malik and Richard Comte with students from the Music Department of the Université Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint Denis, in a steam bath and a black space. Nick Macri with students from the specialized jazz cycle and preparatory classes for higher education at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional (CRR) of Paris. From Nick and Toma Gouband with improvisers from the PIL (PoCo Improvisation Laboratoire), at Le Local socio-cultural center in Poitiers. Richard Comte and Magic Malik with music students from the arts degree program at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale (when not with students from the Lycée Fénelon in Brest). And Angel and Richard at Le Petit Salon, a day center for women with or without children in precarious situations in Toulouse. And the whole group with the children and families of the Maison de Quartier de Cantepau in Albi, music mixed with their daily lives. Her favorite show. Everywhere and all the time, and sometimes on the merry-go-round of everything possible.
