2023-11-24 10:00:07
Singer China Moses during the Paris Soul Fest, at La Place, in Paris, November 23, 2023. MARONE
The bar at the hip-hop cultural center La Place was full. The venue, located on the first floor of the Canopée des Halles, in Paris, is hosting, this Thursday, November 23, the first festival dedicated to soul music made in France. Its organizer, the singer China Moses, invited the author and musicologist Belkacem Meziane to reflect on her origins, her presence in France and this question: why did she never have the audience of French rap, For example ?
At the end of the 1990s, with the debut of Hasheem and the success in the United States of Nubians, the French soul scene thought it had a bright future ahead of it. With the singers Sandy Cossett, China Moses, K-Reen or the rasta Badié, the first albums of Sinclair or those of Ben l’Oncle Soul, the planets seemed aligned. Then the momentum of the 2000s ran out of steam: “We had nowhere to play, no venues, no festivalsexplains China Moses. The programmers of jazz festivals did not understand us, and it was not yet fashionable to program rap or R’n’B in current music festivals. Singers like Sandy Cossett ended up giving up, Sinclair and Ben turned to French song or variety, and I took a ten-year detour to jazz. »
Concert de Sly Johnson
The daughter of singer Dee Dee Bridgewater took up Dinah Washington’s repertoire, sang with pianists Raphaël Lemonnier and André Manoukian, then she left to live in London, where British soul has its legends: from Carleen Anderson to Amy Winehouse , through Omar. She saw the emergence of the neojazz scene, where musicians “ten to twenty years younger are without complexes, without limits”, and made her want to return to France to breathe new life into the music she loves.
In the meantime, soul singing returned through rap, thanks to its producers. And China Moses has just finished a first tour with eight musicians on stage, without an album to promote, which was sold out over fifteen dates. So, in September, the singer went to see La Place, which has two beautiful concert halls, and proposed her festival: “Its director, Julien Cholewa, opened the doors wide for usshe rejoices. This first festival is a response to all the times I heard these thoughts: “There is no festival to program what you do”, “Soul in France, made by French people, is of no interest person”, etc. » Thursday evening, the Sly Johnson concert was packed, and even received a surprise visit from an American singer, Dear Silas, because soul music is above all a matter of sharing and thrills.
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