a 40th edition focused on the future, youth and experimentation

Far from looking retro, the Banlieues Bleues festival, embracing jazz, improvised music and world music, will blow out its forty candles this Friday, March 24 in Seine-Saint-Denis with a program favoring youth and experimentation. If not the poster, a nod to the past with a black and white photo of the 1989 edition showing Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba kissing, festival boss Xavier Leduire has made another bet. “The idea was to look at what is happening today and the musicians who are transforming the musical landscape”he told AFP.

“Less jazz in the strict sense of the term”

Initially planned at the University of Paris-8 in Saint-Denis and in the Grandes Serres de Pantin, these evenings will take place at Dynamo, the headquarters of Banlieues Bleues in Pantin, some of the universities being mobilized against the pension reform, and the Grandes Serres which do not meet safety standards.

In this program, what part for jazz, for a long time one of the markers of Banlieues Bleues? It will take a week for him to make his appearance, with a formation led by drummer Hamid Drake, for a tribute to John Coltrane. Drummer Arnaud Dolmen and guitarist Marc Ribot will be other ambassadors.

“There is a lot less jazz in the strict sense of the term at Banlieues Bleus today, and this year even more than usual”confirms the president. “New technologies have shattered forms. Musicians have taken over machines to do totally new things”pursues the one for whom “the philosophy of the festival has not changed, it is the music that has changed”.

Triumphant Youth

In the midst of this triumphant youth, where micro-sampling, machines, samplings, mixes took power, the Congolese Ray Lema, who at the end of the 70s was a pioneer by being one of the first African musicians to integrate electro sounds to color his rumba, is now an ancestor.

Beyond the rumba-jazz of Ray Lema, Banlieues Bleues continues to lend an ear to the upheavals of world music, with the Colombian guitarist-flutist Teto Ocampo, the Andalusian singer Rocio Marquez who opens flamenco to electronic programming, the group street of Kinshasa Fulu Miziki (“garbage bin music”) and Brazilian rapper Emicida.