With “Oizel”, Marion Rampal takes the height between mixed jazz and French song

Singer-songwriter Marion Rampal has just released her new album “Oizel”. Eleven pieces that mix jazz, folk and French song influences, and give the sensation of flying.

By discovering a disc title like Oizel, it’s difficult not to make the analogy with birds rising into the air. Moreover, one of the eleven tracks from Marion Rampal’s new album is called Bird. Two neologisms which well symbolize the atmosphere of this opus, February 2. Because from the opening Tangobor, we are seized by this sensation of aerial floating, of letting go. The singer’s ethereal voice is supported by delicate and refined arrangements, signed by multi-instrumentalist Matthis Pascaud who has accompanied Marion Rampal in her musical projects since 2020.

After this introduction which immediately invites us to fly away, the single Beautiful Sundays in duet with Bertrand Belin navigates between lightness and melancholy.

The next track gains energy with even more rhythmic music and a country-folk guitar which gives way to a klezmer-style clarinet. Big bear is inspired by a text by Florence Aubenas about a woman who broke with the world to lead a wild life.

Marion Rampal explains: “I have always been fascinated by these slightly monstrous ancestral figures. Which in some way resonated with my desire to explore marginality and this shift towards the obscure, towards a madness which is also a liberation.” She adds : “The story of this woman in the Cévennes who lives hidden in the woods, enters unoccupied houses, steals food, clothes, changed my fantasy into reality. She allowed me to finish the song.”

Another atmosphere, the haunting leitmotif of Coulemonde invites you to sway your hips, halfway between laidback and rumba. And always this desire to let go, with yet another invented expression. Let it flow, let it go, feel the roll, Marion Rampal seems to be telling us.

The expressions, the language, she kneads them, she makes them her own. “Words, words, words are beautiful”she tells us in The wordspreceded by a very beautiful instrumental interlude.

The bird as a common thread

Again an original formulation with Station where is going which takes us into a musical scent of Creole islands using the metaphor of the wild goose to symbolize our sentimental wanderings. And the waterflies are definitely in the spotlight in this album, through Ducks in duet with Laura Cahen, or the quasi-title track Bird who waddles in Dixieland ragtime mode.

Marion Rampal confirms this theme which runs through the album: “The bird, its symbolism to which the idea of ​​freedom is linked, accompanied me throughout the gestation of this album, the aim of which was to seize the French language more than I had done. previously.”

This red thread extends into Where do we come from in winter? which evokes a caring grandmother, Madeleine, and thus recalls the mythological function of certain birds to accompany the souls of the deceased. The disc closes with the almost instrumental To the flowers. A single sentence to close a quest both internal and in the air. Marion Rampal made us want to abandon ourselves to strolling, to dreams and to flight. His music is a precious travel companion, whether real or imagined.

“Oizel” by Marion Rampal was released on February 2 (Underground Rivers / the other distribution)

Official website of the artist