Orchestre Granville Desronvil | zh

From the Republic of Benin, West Africa, T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo is one of Africa’s least-known big-bands outside of their home country. Here, it’s hoped to redress the balance with a collection that reflects their many poly-rhythmic moods. A mixture of hard Afro-Funk, driving Afrobeat, deep Afro-Latin and Cuban grooves all with a unique flavor that ruled the dance-floors of 70’s urban Benin. .

Granville Automatic is Vanessa Olivarez and Elizabeth Elkins. The duo write songs pulled from a shared love of history, horses and war. Granville Automatic is named after a 19th-century typewriter: Vanessa is a collector. With sonic references like Lyle Lovett, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson, Granville Automatic has created a quiet and lyrical sound devoted to telling stories from the past. After writing together first in the spring of 2009, the pair now has more than 80 songs – almost all of which tell stories from history. The band is hard at work in Nashville and Los Angeles on its...

The Orchestre International du Vetex started up in february 2004. Two professional Flemish (Belgian Dutch-speaking) musicians, Ruben Deprez and Michaël De Schrijver, gathered volunteers in the deprived neighbourhood of Venning-Veemarkt in Kortrijk (Belgium) to create a festive brassband for the yearly Spanish ‘Fiesta Mestiza’ in the old building of the knitting factory Vetex. Next to the locals of Kortrijk, they also found musicians in the french-speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia, ánd across the French border in Lille. The international orchestre of the Vetex was created and was proud to be able to make music within such a big social and...

Barbés is a piece of Africa stranded in the heart of Paris, at the foot of the Sacre Coeur. It is a neighborhood of couscous and chicken, of smoke-filled bars where dominos click on tabletops, of dish antennas transmitting floods of Middle Eastern music through TV sets. In Barbés, you could have met the late Cheikha Rimitti, the grand dame of raï, on the Rue Myrrha walking back to her hotel. Or a band hired to sing at a wedding stopping to pick up their musicians at a café- The Oasis, The Délice, or The Danton. People from every corner...