[Karayib Focus] Grégory Privat or a creative big bang
Ndlr : this article was published for the first time on myinsaeng.com on March 24th 2020.
I feel like every year brings me a new Caribbean jazzman favorite. 2018, it was Arnaud Dolmen. 2019, it was Stéphane Castry. 2020, it's Gregory Privat.
I've been hearing about him since 2018. Guadeloupean jazz artists and Martinicans jazz artists gravitate in the same universe, invite themselves on the projects of each other. We inevitably end up listening to their solo adventures. Last year, thanks to "Basstry Therapy", I started to listen to Sonny Troupé aka potential favorite of 2021 if I finally manage to attend a concert of Expéka. It turns out that he made a duet album with Gregory Privat: "Luminescence". A great moment of perplexity and curiosity for me.
Grégory Privat or a musical big bang
Usually, my first listen follows the tracklist order. For this album, I let the titles guide me. I think I started with "On Ka Avè Piano". That's the concept of the album. I still expect to hear more ka (Guadeloupean traditional drum), I expect it to take over. Maybe I want the ka to take the lead... because I forgot that the piano also has its own particular power. And the speed with which the notes follow each other to create the melody takes me by surprise.
I can't say that I enjoy it immediately. My brain is mostly trying to figure out how the balance works so well. I love the rain (when I'm warm wrapped up in my comforter, of course) so I start the track "Rainy Day". There, my brain stops thinking and my heart gets carried away. Creating such sweetness with so much energy... Usually, I have fragments of stories that come to mind when I listen to music. Here, all I can imagine are their hands on their instruments, I feel like I can hear their movements, see their precision. The song is about twelve minutes long. I know it by heart, but I still catch myself sometimes having a second of surprise when the last note sounds. I know it's coming, but I'm so carried away that I forget that every journey has an end. I think the first time I listened to this track was back in September or October 2019 and I'm still stuck on it to the point where I haven't really explored the rest of this album. I've tried, but every time I start another track, I cut off after a minute or two and go back to "Rainy Day"...
Grégory Privat is a musical big bang
A month later, I gave the album "Family Tree" a try. And there again, I was so disoriented that I only listened to it once before going back to "Rainy Day". At the beginning of January, the single "Las" [t/n: it means “exhausted” in Kréyol] was my trigger. It was released on a day when I'm particularly exhausted after a day of work. Spotify suggested it to me. I clicked on the track because of the title and I ended up leaving it on repeat all evening. With each repeat, I focused on a different element: the voice, the instruments, the lyrics. The jazzy pop futuristic sounds got confirmed with the album that followed a few days later. This time, I went from one track to another because I wanted to listen to everything. This time, I had a lot of images that came to my mind especially for "DNA" and "Exodus" which, I think, would have been perfect for the soundtrack of "Battledream Chronicle". Without surprise, "Seducing The Rain" became my favorite track...
And it was the one that led me to listen to "Seducing The Sun" on "Family Tree". Trigger #2. And I can finally find the words to express what I like in Gregory Privat's music. It appeals to my sense of analysis and rigor. I concentrate first on it as an entity that I have to deconstruct to understand what it makes me feel. His music is complex under the cover of harmonious simplicity and that's probably why he manages so well to insert electro-pop with the ability to touch an audience that doesn't usually listen to jazz.
It's my first time discovering an artist’s discography in such a chaotic way. I like to do things in order, that is to say following a chronology because I like to visualize the artist’s growth from one album to the other. If I had started with his first album "Ki Koté", I honestly believe that I wouldn’t have looked further. This album is so over-the-top that it feels like it's exploding in all directions while remaining fairly traditional. It’s a paradox, I know. You can already hear everything that makes his current style original, but hidden behind a framed jazz style.
Spotify doesn't have the "Tales of Cyparis" (2013) album so I listened to a few tracks via YouTube but I prefer to listen to it as an album and not as an audio/video... But from the explanations given, this concept album reflects his intentional side to put music at the heart of cultural transmission. So, Grégory Privat ticks all the right boxes for me to stay tuned and watch his career.
P.S: music aside, I’d like to mention his online communication strategy: the website is almost perfect, the Youtube channel is efficient, his social networks are coherent... And he still keeps a part of the mystery. An image made to manage an international career.