Lojo in Georgia (c) 2012 Andy Morgan

The best thing about drinking wine from a hollowed out ram’s horn is that you can’t put the thing down. You have to keep holding onto to it otherwise it’ll topple over, and if you’re holding it, you might as well carry on drinking. Inevitably, with a ram’s horn goblet in hand, the wine keeps flowing and the party keeps going into the small hours. It’s a very Georgian kind of drinking vessel.

In a largely deserted museum gallery, Lo’Jo’s lead singer and songwriter Denis Péan stares placidly at a portrait of a man pouring wine into a ram’s horn. It’s by the great Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani, the son of peasant farmers who lived a marginal life over a century ago, painting shop signs to earn a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread. Now his work has pride of place in Georgia’s National Museum of Art. There’s something about his paintings of carousing men and sad-eyed Georgian beauties that’s beyond calculation, as if they were painted by a child who also happened to possess the gentle curiosity and bitter-sweet experience of an old man. They remind me obliquely of Lo’Jo’s music.

As we coax our hearts open to the power of Pirosmani, I ask Denis what he finds so seductive about Georgia. He’s visiting the country for the fifth time and has quite obviously fallen in love with the place. “It’s a humour, a taste, a smell,” he replies, “a charm that goes beyond discussion or argument. Take their love of a good feast for example. I mean, you can be anywhere, lost in the depths of the countryside, and people will bring out a large table, a white table-cloth from their chest, a large pitcher of wine and suddenly, from nothing, there’s the wherewithal to put on a feast for one hundred people. It’s splendid.”

Denis’ words evoke another table that is equally ready to feed friends and strangers alike at any moment, one covered in a tatty old oilskin cloth and laden with succulent grilled meats and bottles of red Anjou wine. It dominates the kitchen of Lo’Jo’s large, ramshackle headquarters near Angers in the west of France. Most members of the band once lived together in this solid old farmhouse, but communal life has its limits and Denis is the only Lo’Jo who lives in the place now. The others have all gone off to raise families in houses and apartments scattered around the gentle hills of the Loire.

Nonetheless, the house is still the hub of the band’s roving existence. The place was renovated over a decade ago by the music-loving mayor of a nearby town and fitted out as an residential music laboratory, an ideal communal creative space, all at the tax payer’s expense.  “It’s a cosmopolitan place,” Denis says, “modelled on a dream, or a utopia that’s almost within reach. The traveller finds shelter there, the table is always open. It’s a pivot for chance encounters, an open book for children.” Lo’Jo’s latest album, Cinema El Mundo, was written, rehearsed and recorded in a barn that adjoins the house.

‘Two Georgians at Marani’ by Nikos Pirosmani

Like Georgia, stuck out on the frontiers of what was once called ‘the Christian world’, Angers, in French terms at least, is a marginal place. But then Lo’Jo are also an defiantly marginal band. Not for them the ratatouille of Parisian showbiz. “To be marginal simply allows you to be free,” Denis confirms with a matter-of-fact shrug of the shoulders. “The music business tends to sell itself for a kowtow and forget about the cosmos. Once it seemed hard to exist as a band so far from Paris. Nowadays it only feels like like an immense advantage.”

In 1982, Denis Péan and violinist Richard Bourreau decided to create a little side-project to alleviate the tedium of their classical music courses at the Angers conservatoire. They called it Lo’Jo because the name meant nothing much in particular whilst sounding naive and playful.  They pooled their instruments – bassoon, violin, cello – and their passions – Debussy, Robert Wyatt, Led Zeppelin, Leo Ferré, Coltrane, punk rock – and came up with a sound whose originality deepened as the band began to integrate musical flavours from the four points of the compass.

Then in 1988, Lo’Jo were invited by the local street-theatre company Jo Bithume to provide the music for a touring show called Décrocher La Lune (Unhook The Moon). It was a carnival on wheels, a caravan of late twentieth century Pierrots and Bozos, musicians and acrobats, revellers and pilgrims. The show toured Europe for three years and Lo’Jo discovered their essential love of travel. Like 19^th century botanists, Lo’Jo were propelled to new horizons by a powerful curiosity, an avid appetite for new shapes and colours, a lust for a fresh view of the human circus. And when they returned home to Angers – from Mali, The Sahara, Reunion Island, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Cambodia – it wasn’t rare butterflies and orchids they brought back but new sounds and new instruments. These were then integrated into a style that grew ever more unclassifiable.

“It’s exciting to travel to unlikely places and play,” Denis tells me, “and travel nourishes the songs that come afterwards, because it nourishes our knowledge of the world. Our music talks about those journeys, those migrations.”

But can travel also become a form of escape? “I don’t know if we really chose to travel. It just happened.We found ourselves taking to the road, and it suited us. It’s become totally natural in fact. But it’s true that I have this great interest in the elsewhere, for what is different, in compensation for my rural origins, which were very sedentary.”

So was travel a kind of revolt? “No, not a revolt. Just to a reaction to my reality. My ancestors stayed at home, because they weren’t interested in the rest of the world, but also because they didn’t have the possibility to travel. They were peasants after all, and when you’re on the farm, you have animals and you’re bound to stay put.”

I ask Denis how he reacts to the word ‘exotic’? “Well it has that negative appearance, linked to tourism, which finds something interesting simply because it’s far away. But Lo’Jo isn’t searching for the exotic, not at all.  In any case, I don’t see anything particularly extraordinary in the idea of mixing different sounds, because in one hundred years, two hundred years, all music will be like that. It can’t be otherwise.”

In other words, embrace the Babel that is human existence, the “knowing bazaar, heterodox boutique, made of outlandish flavours and treasures, the great big market of the apocalypse” that is life, according to the lyrics of ‘C’est La Vie’, one of Péan’s greatest songs. But let it serve your own voice, not the other way round.

Searching for the exotic tends to produce fusionistic gewgaws, in which the parts militate against the whole. Lo’Jo do something quite else. Their polyglot clutter of instruments and sounds, the sawing imzad of the Sahara, the fizzing kamelgoni and sprinkling kora from southern Mali, the wheezing south Asian harmonium, the melodica, clarinet, sax, violin, bass, all of them serve a coherent style. All the rhythms and flavours that echo through their songs – funk, rock, jazz, chanson, créole, maloya, ragga, tindé, oriental pop – are brushstrokes in a picture that sits comfortably in its frame and makes sense. Everything serves a whole that has been carefully constructed through years of experimentation and changing line-ups.

With the relatively recent addition of drummer Baptiste Brondy, a 26-year-old toddler compared to the venerable founder members, the group now has a settled and permanent feel about it. Péan’s Gallic growl sits atop the alien yet sweetly familiar harmonies of Nadia Nid El Mourid and her sister Yamina, the daughters of North African migrants who settled near Angers in the 1970s. The agile gracenotes of Richard Bourreau’s violin flirt with the earthy bass of Nicolas ‘Kham’ Meslien, both upright and electric. Brondy’s drums inject youth and energy.

Central to the band’s appeal are the lyrics of Denis Péan, a fine poet who has published several books of poems. He travels without a laptop, camera or smartphone, relying simply on his mind to store pictures and sound. “I’m surrounded by people who take pictures,” he tells me. “Writing is a different approach to reality. Memory just preserves what is essential, which is the feeling of a place. A song depends on the décor. It’s a film in words, with the impressions, the moments, and without judgement, because it’s reality and nothing more.”

Denis Péan in the old town of Tbilisi. (c) 2012 Andy Morgan

Every Lo’Jo album, and there have been thirteen so far, lays out a table and invites other musicians to come and join in the feast. The opening words of Cinema El Mundo are intoned by Robert Wyatt. Other guests include Ibrahim Ag Alhabib from Tinariwen, The Mauritian Sega soul rebel Menwar, René Lacaille from Réunion Island, Malian ngoni player Andra Kouyate and many more. Lo’Jo invites the world to its banquet, in music, in word, in person, and then serves their world up for our ears to feast on.

Niaz Diasamidze is another guest on Cinema El Mundo. He’s a big rocky boulder of a man who plays genial host during our stay in Tbilisi. Diasamidze isn’t only a master of the Georgian panduri, a three-stringed lute through which, according to Péan, “the whole country breathes”, he also makes the instrument and is soon to open a panduri shop in the old ‘silk road’ quarter of Tbilisi. Diasamidze speaks perfect French, is the founder and director of the annual Art Gene festival of traditional music and dance, owns Club 33A where Lo’Jo are performing this time round, and runs an music equipment shop and hire company. Oh, and he has his own band called 33a who play the best contemporary Georgian music I’ve heard so far and can eat and drink the hind legs off a Caucasian mountain goat. Quite a dude is Niaz.

In the early 1990s, during the turbulent heat of the post-perestroika years, Niaz was studying graphic design at the École Des Beaux Arts in Tbilisi. The place was breeding radical young musicians with plenty to say. “During those years, everything was the opposite to what it should be,” he tells me in his nicotine stained voice. “There was the civil war between us Georgians, which should never have happened. There was the war in Abkhazia with the Russians. In fact, everyone around me had a weapon. A machine-gun then was like a cigarette is now. Not even worth mentioning.”

Niaz picked up and started playing the electric guitar, “because I liked the sound of the fuzz pedal!” But then, the rebellious rocker turned into an hungry pilgrim in search of Georgia’s authentic musical voice. With groups of friends, Niaz would drive up into tiny villages up in the hills and mountains of Gouria, Kakheti or Abkhazia to listen to old people singing old songs. He wasn’t the only one. Many contemporaries seemed to share his quest. “There was patriotism in there too, because they [the Soviets] tried to oppress our identity so much, that a feeling arose during those years, to go out and rediscover our music and our poetry. Identity still motivates me. Without that I wouldn’t play music. It wouldn’t interest me.”

Niaz tells me that life is improving, and that Georgians are learning how to be free again. Cranes, scaffolding hard hats and dust are all over Tbilisi. There are two cities in one here: the old one, wrinkled, arthritic, palsied and the new one, peachy, proud and hopeful. When Lo’Jo first visited the place in 2005, as part of Babel Caucase, a inspirational caravan of painters, clowns and musicians that crossed the whole of Europe en route to Grozny to raise awareness of the suffering of the Chechen people, only the old Georgia was in evidence. 

“It made me think of something which I never knew,” Péan remembers, “which is the French countryside of perhaps one century ago, with its women in their large scarves, pushing their clogs through the earth. And those small holdings, those little parcels of land.” Yamina Nid El Mourid likened the Georgian countryside to Africa, only white not black.

Babel Caucase never reached Grozny. Instead, Lo’Jo played a concert in a Chenchen refugee camp high up in the Pankisi Gorge, near the Chechen border. It was a wild, emotional, drunken night, that teetered on the edge of disaster for a while but pulled itself up high and smiling by the end. In its spirit of crazed adventure, without a safety net or rider, it was a bit like the first Festival in the Desert in the far north east of Mali, which Lo’Jo helped to organise in 2001.

I ask Denis whether he was frustrated not to reach Grozny. “No, because I’m satisfied with what the moment brings me,” he answers with a sage shrug. “And I’ve always, during my life, liked journeys that happen thanks to the cancellation of some other project. I find myself an innocent, like a virgin in the situation, in that cosmic flaw which you never imagined would happen, which was unintended.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012
First published in Songlines Magazine – Oct 2012

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Iness Mezel

It was one of those perfect moments, when passion burns up the concept, and Iness Mezel’s words begin to canter excitedly as she remembers it: “You arrive at the studio with all your baggage and paraphernalia and you lay them out and something just happens, beyond all expectations. Beyond trance. Beyond consciousness. And I love everything about that invisible world beyond, into which you travel with music, because you’re no longer here. We had plenty of moments like that in the studio, when we were just shouting out, “YEAH!” It wasn’t self-satisfaction, it was just about “Wow!””

The concept had already been around for years; a fearlessly modern blend of North African Amazigh or ‘Berber’ music and other styles that inhabit the flipside of Iness Mezel’s complex identity, such as funk, soul and jazz. “My music was there,” says Iness, “but it just needed something or someone to optimize it.” That someone was Justin Adams, English guitarist of blossoming fame, sideman to Robert Plant, half of the award-winning duo Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara, producer of Tinariwen, Natasha Atlas, Lo’Jo and many more. “I looked up Justin’s profile on the web,” Iness continues, “and I thought to myself – he’s going to understand!” And the result of this marriage made in some musical heaven?; ‘Beyond The Trance’

It’s taken a long time coming; seven years since Mezel’s previous album ‘Len’ and thirteen since her debut ‘Wedfel’.  “I want to be sincere and I don’t want to compromise my artistic choices so I work slowly. I can’t really say more than that,” Iness states by way of explanation. Her life story doesn’t lend itself to easy conclusions and a flat-pack quick-assembly musical identity. Woman, North African, Berber; there’s so much there to defend, to be proud of, to proclaim but so many pitfalls too, so many easy dead ends and clichés to avoid at all costs.

Fatiha Messaoudi, aka Iness Mezel, was born to a Franco-Italian mother and an Algerian-Kabyle father. The Kabyle are the largest Amazigh minority in North Africa, descended, like all Berbers, from the tribes who inhabited the region before the arrival of the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Ottomans and the French. They speak their own language, and are fiercely proud of their distinct culture, which is Mediterranean rather than Middle Eastern or Arab. They inhabit the lofty heights and foothills of the Djurdjura Mountains that rise up to the east of the Algerian capital Algiers. The land is beautiful but hard to cultivate and emigration is hard-wired into the Kabyle experience. Kabyle women are strong, proud and independent. Not for them the veiled subservience prescribed by fundamentalist Islam. Like all Berbers, the Kabyles love music and poetry.

Iness Mezel’s father was born and raised in Ighil I Azzouzen, a tiny Kabyle village not far from the Kabyle capital Tizi Ouzou. He came to France in 1954, on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence.” My father was involved in the struggle,” reveals Iness. “But it was his battle. I can’t really talk that much for him.” Her mother was born and raised in the Auvergne, the wild, remote and hilly heartlands of central France. Iness’ maternal grandfather was an Italian, from the hills of Lombardy. Thus Iness’ blood flows in from hills and mountains on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean, from people who worked the land and lived a tough life softened only by poetry, music, food, family and cultural pride.

For the first seven years of her life, Iness lived in the working class suburb of St Ouen, to the north of Paris, where her father worked as a taxi driver, and her mother as a nurse. Then, at the age of seven, she went to live in Algeria. For two years she spent her holidays with her grandmother and aunts in Ighil I Azzouzen, and went to school in Algiers. “Algeria has left an imprint on me like a tattoo. The strongest memory is the colour of the earth and the grasses, which were dry and brown. I remember my aunts in long dresses with soft materials and simple prints, their bare feet grazed and scratched. I remember the ceremonies and rituals like the jdev, when the Cheikh and other village elders comes to bless a house that has just been built and there are processions of women holding torches. It was just village life. Anything musical was linked to feasts and village occasions.”

At the age of nine the family moved back across the Mediterranean and lived with Iness’ grandmother in the town of Riom es Montagne, deep in the green hills of the Auvergne. Iness and her sister Malika were given the keys to the clubhouse of the local brass band, and they spent many weekends having fun on the instruments. “I didn’t have much of an idea about who I was, but on the other hand I realized that I was absorbed by music. It was like a lifebuoy for me.”

Iness’ grandmothers taught her some profound lessons, not in the literal sense but sub-consciously, by their presence and their actions. “My Algerian grandmother is the archetype of the woman who won’t let herself be pushed around, who runs the household and commands her world. And it wasn’t just her, because my aunts were like that too. My French grandmother was a very very strong woman, whose life was even harder in some ways. I was very close to her.”

After two years of life in the hills, Iness returned to Paris with her family and settled in the suburb of Levallois. She fell in love with pop, disco and funk and remembers the thrill of buying her first record, “Don’t Blame It On The Boogie” during a school trip to London at the age of 14. Other early favourites were Christopher Cross, Elton John and Donald Fagen.  Her own musical life was discreet and home-based, mucking about on the piano or cutting up and changing the melodies and lyrics of favourite songs like ‘Yellow Brick Road’ by Elton John with mates from school.  She also studied piano at the local conservatory throughout her teens, a rock solid grounding for future musical adventures.

Studying law at the University of Paris, Iness realized that a straight and narrow career path in one of the liberal professions would never satisfy her soul. “At that moment, I asked myself – what’s the most important thing for me?  And it was then that I started getting into music more seriously.”  She took lessons in lyrical singing with Nicole Maison, a baroque singer with the Camerata de Paris.

Iness had been composing at home on the piano for some years, but now she started to work professionally, mostly as a stand-in singer for various African, jazz and covers bands. Her musical territory became the bars and clubs in the Châtelet area, especially one called the ‘Caf’ Conc’, where she learned the unavoidable lessons of stagecraft and met a new world of musicians, some of whom like bassist Étienne Bapé, drummers Paco Séri and Christopher Henry, pianist Dominique Fillon and guitarist Eric Sauviat became key players in her solo career. Another important teacher was Claude Cesaire, nephew of the famous Antillean poet Aimé Cesaire, who taught Iness the jazz songbook and the inner workings of jazz chord progressions.  She also learned jazz improvisation with the Paris-based American singer Sarah Lazarus.  After a huge variety of ‘solo’ experiences, Iness formed a vocal duo, which began to earn a useful reputation as a backing vocal unit on the scene.

It was when the established Kabyle singer, writer and film-maker Djur Djura asked Iness to join her group that Iness’ diffuse musical ambitions were suddenly redirected towards a new and compelling objective.  Djur Djura was already a name of some renown in the world of Algerian and Amazigh music. With her, Iness started to perform in major concert halls and festival, and gain a privileged access into the heart of the Amazigh music scene. “When I was approached by Djura it was like an answer to my self-searching as an artist,” Iness remembers. “I discovered the music of my brothers and sisters and I discovered what it meant to sing in Kabyle. I also began to develop a political conscience. Things began to make sense.”

Djur Djura also introduced Iness to her life-long friend, manager, mentor, percussionist, adviser and rock in troubled times:  Nora Abdoun-Boyer.  Iness, Nora and her sister became a unit of musical adventurers, like a family of like-minded sisters with shared origins and creative ambitions, who would spend many hours working together, inching towards a new and very personal idiom that mixed Kabyle music and lyrics with the most extraneous styles. Iness and her sister would compose songs together, and Nora was the sounding board, the trusted ‘ears’ of the trio. After many months the trio performed together with a violinist and a second percussionist at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris supporting Idir and many other Amazigh ‘greats.’ “They must have thought we were a UFO which had just landed,” Iness recalls with a resigned chuckle. “Admittedly, we were heading the right direction, but we hadn’t gone deep enough.”

The trio worked at home, whilst Iness was still going out to sing with a range of different artists, including the avant-garde singer Tamia Valmont. The grail was a modern, North African, Mediterranean but intensely personal style, in other words, a true reflection of Iness’ identity. The first album ‘Berber Singing Goes World’, released on Auvidis in 1997, was only a partial realization of this dream, despite being warmly received by the critics.  In 1999, the album was released under the title ‘Wedfel’ with extra tracks on the the French label Naïve.

After the release of the album and a series of concerts in Morocco and Canada, her sister quit. “She left without warning,” Iness admits reluctantly. “I think she was searching for herself at the time.” It was a difficult period, but calamity turned into a strange kind of blessing. “It’s almost as if I was reborn after that incident,” she says. “I had to walk on my own two legs. I had to define myself. Nora and her father Boussad helped me a lot. They’re Kabyle, and he’s very open and young at heart. At one point I asked him to ‘dub’ me, like Kings used to do to Knights in the old days. And he suggested the name ‘Iness Mezel’, which means, ‘Tell him never to despair’.”

The next album ‘Len’, which Iness calls the first real Iness Mezel album, with its ever closer marriage of Kabyle with funk,  pop and western classical music, was recorded in 2001 and released in 2003.  “It’s the album on which I really began to express my whole self for the first time, to lay my guts on the table,” she says. “I had things to prove, technically, musically. It was more radical than anything I had done before. I was no longer looking for myself. I knew which ideas I wanted to pursue and I was very proud of the result in fact.  I needed the recognition which that album gave me.”

Nora and her father also helped Iness to crystallize her attitude towards Tamazight, the loose collective name for the many distinct dialects of the Berbers. It became a precious tool that Iness felt the need to defend.  “I love the musicality of Kabyle but I don’t master the language in a poetic sense of the term,” says Iness. “So I write in French, and then translate that into Kabyle and base my lyric on that translation. I used to freak out about the idea of singing in French because I feel completely naked when I do. But singing in French is also a way of expressing all aspects of my personality. It allows me to be more objective. I’ve also used poems by Si Mohand ou Mohand, a famous wandering 19^th century Kabyle poet, in some of the songs. I wanted to pay tribute to him”

So, in many ways, ‘Beyond the Trance’ is a reaffirmation; a reclamation of confidence, “of giving myself to myself, ” as Iness describes it.  “I was able to see myself how I am, and express the whole me; French, Kabyle, Parisian, everything.” Not only was there the new-found courage to bare her soul more fully in her everyday language of French, but also the strength to allow others into her creative process without fear of loosing control. “I’ve tended to operate in quite a solitary way at times. And I’ve never been part of a group in the classic sense. So this meeting with so many new musicians is wonderful and interesting. I feel I’m liberating myself.”

Self, identity and musical style walk hand in hand, each one defining the other. For Iness Mezel, none of the three has been easy to grapple, to pin down and define. In many ways, it was a feat that could only be achieved when her music stopped asking so many questions, and demanding so many answers. It could only be achieved when the music broke free of the concept and went into that space beyond; joyful, confident and complete.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2010
Artist Biography written for Wrasse Records – Dec 2010

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