Carriere Brothers - Old Time Louisiana Creole Music - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Soulful and radiant, ALA. NI shines in Sunshine Music. Ten years after 'You & I', which left a mark in France and internationally (with collaborations including Iggy Pop, Lakeith Stanfield, and Jon Batiste), the golden-voiced Londoner returns with a new album blending vintage tones and Caribbean influences. Shaped by a two-year stay in Jamaica, the musician delivers eleven timelessly elegant tracks infused with the laid-back charm of life surrounded by rich nature. Calypso, ragga, bossa, rocksteady... In this new album, ALA. NI allows herself subtle rewritings of the most emblematic Caribbean rhythms, with interpretations that go as far as Brazil. Her crystalline voice dances, with jazz inflections reminiscent of Sade Adu and Minnie Riperton.

The French-speaking, black Creoles from the prairies of lower Louisiana produce a wide variety of music, from Cajun two-steps to the blues. This album presents a range of styles, including nineteenth century dance tunes from Louisiana and the West Indies, as well as early twentieth century American one-steps and blues.

This recording is a full-band rearrangement of the original- a solo piano & vocals ballad posted to Patreon in April of 2019, now turned rock song. It is about memory. It's about the past and how the past sometimes calls for us, but we can't go back to it. It's about how events are stamped in time, but not necessarily our minds.Some of my earliest memories are of the giant willow tree that stood in the yard of my childhood, looming over the house. I still see this huge yellow tree all the time in my mind's eye, but it's always changing, always a bit different. This is referenced in the first verse of the song.Another set of memories are from when I said goodbye to my grandfather in a hospital the order of his last words to me, my sister standing on the opposite side of the bed, the elevator doors closing... I want to remember all of this in detail, but I'm not sure that's possible. This is what the second verse is about.Memories come randomly to me when I'm sitting at the piano, mindlessly playing. It's a kind of meditation, and as I noodle away events from the past float in and out of my skull, morphing and conflating with one another. A teenage road trip arrives at last year's swimming hole; mind-mush. It's as if the notes act as doorways for the memories to slip in and out, and they swim around together in my head like snakes in a well. This is more or less what I'm going on about in the third verse.This is one of my favorite tracks on the LP because it's metamorphosis from a slow piano ballad into the groovy number you now hear was one of the most profound transformations that occurred while remaking songs for this album. The two versions are entirely different, yet both, I think, work.