Between Jazz and soul, pop and rock, african

music and Biguine, from the cariBean

to the great north, FM LÆTI has travelled far

and wide. the singer and her Band have eaten

up the thousands of miles and diverse sounds

which trancends in this solar alBum with

a striking Bright voice, sometimes

light sometimes low But always moving.

inspired By melodies and rythms reminescent

of the 70’s rock and soul-pop. it’s “it will all

come around”. it’s FM LÆTI. enJoy.

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Night in Manitoba

She’s nine or ten years old. After a brief stay in the proud city of Vancouver, on the Pacific Coast, Laeti’s family finds refuge in the heart of rural Manitoba, in Brandon, capital city of ice hockey, nicknamed wheat city after the immense fields surrounding it.

Family road trips are a tradition. The endlessly straight road climbs up and down the hills before disappearing on the horizon, below the crest of the Rockies. On one side, the yellow hue of wheat, on the other, a blue sea of linseed.

Music is always playing on the road. Jazz, classical, African music. And it’s always blasting in Laeti’s walkman. Nirvana, Run DMC and hip-hop.

At school, Laeti plays the flute, but she decides to make music with her voice and joins a chamber choir. While in junior high school, she learns vocal jazz and gospel. She starts practicing ballet and modern jazz. Twenty hours a week. Her new dream is to become prima ballerina.

Her stepfather, David -that Laeti’s mother met in Guadeloupe-, is Canadian and works as a classical pianist. He plays Mozart, Bartok, Messiaen. Laeti and her two little sisters, Ingrid and Malika, are always lulled to sleep with beautiful lullabies.

“Night has fallen. It’s freezing cold outside. I am dreaming of Paris, of another world. Paris as I remember when I was so small. The paved streets, the narrow alleys, the old buildings. I can still smell the fresh fruits from the market. It’s cold and I remember…”

Island of light

In Arawak, the primitive local language, Guadeloupe is called Karukera: ‘the island of …beautiful waters’. Laeti prefers to call it the ‘island of light’. She still remembers the family house, Villa Villeneuve, at Morne Caruel, the Sundays spent on the beach, Petit Havre, la Porte d’Enfer or Raisin Clair. The place is packed with family and friends. Children are running around while adults go fishing. Someone brings back fish and sea urchins and starts to cook them on the log fire. Then they settle for a picnic on the sand. And suddenly, it’s pouring rain. Sometimes they all start packing in a hurry and sometimes they stay waiting for it to pass laughing.

Her father, Serge Bourgeois, is Kassav’s drummer and co-founder. And probably one of the inventors of zouk music. Laeti discovers the stage at an early age, her ears are bathed with Caribbean rhythms, biguine and Gwo Ka. She already knows the ups and downs of the artist’s life. Her mother, Marie-Claude, co-founds a music school and Laeti decides to play the drums. Just like daddy.

Guadeloupe is a crossroads that one wants to leave and call home at the same time. Laeti pays tribute to her island in Coco, a beautiful Creole tune carried by those first words: “An vini, an pati, an pati pou rouvinn ti zozyo/Van vanté chalviré, on ti fi ki pati dot koté (I have come, I have gone, I’ve left only to come back little bird/The wind blew and the life of a little girl changed its course). François-Marie, co-composer of the album, comments: “One night, in the studio, we started to jam on what we call a “tournerie” from Cape Verde. Laeti started improvising in Creole. The music brought back her nostalgia for her motherland and the pain of exile. The song is a sort of saudade from Guadeloupe. The first versions were twenty minutes long (when the biguine begins…). Then Fatoumata Diawara joined us in the studio and they started singing back to each other, in their mother tongues. They talked about how they longed for their homes, Guadeloupe and Mali, and made up the story of little Coco, a girl torn between the necessity to leave her home and the need to be reunited with her country.”

Coco is young Laeti crying uncontrollably at the airport when she had to leave for Canada. “Baby carried in the musical cradle of her mother’s belly”.

Laeti came back to her island many years later. She hadn’t seen her father in twelve years. Today, they’re as close as ever.

Nina, Miles, Percy, Otis… and Hugo

Serge and Marie-Claude split up when Laeti was seven. But the houses where she sucessively lived in were all filled with music; a lot of music: jazz, blues, R’n’B. The explosive voice of Nina Simone fills Marie-Claude’ place. The glowing solos on Say love me or leave me, and the deeply moving lyrics of The other woman make a strong impression on Laeti. She remembers Be my husband and Nina singing about the servitude of love. All is said. Those stories tell the hardships of the diva’s life. Kept in mind is the time she was denied admission in a prestigious piano school, in spite of her immense talent. Her fault was to be born black. Like Nina, Miles has become one of the few artists identified by his first name only. For fifty years, the author of Kind of blue and Sketches of Pain will continuously explore new paths, always searching for the most powerful way to pour out the content of his soul.

“Percy and Otis are … major components of my mother’s music library, says Laeti. She loves Percy’s Deep South ballads and old organ sounds; When a man loves a woman but also Take time to know her, where he sings his mother’s advice on love. And she loves Otis, because he’s Otis. The drum beats, the brass sections, the theatricality and… his voice on I’ve got dreams to remember, A change is gonna come or Pain in my heart… this is real old school soul music” Laeti loves the fact that, at one point in time, those singers were part of her mother’s present.

On her island, the hurricanes are also remembered by their first names. Laeti lived through the devastating Hugo. She remembers people raising the alarm, a few days before it arrived, she remembers the windows boarded up in a hurry, she remembers the water supplies and the canned food piled up in the living room, and then she remembers the wind blowing, howling mercilessly, the panic and the huge coconut palm falling on the house. And when all is over, when the tyrant has finally fled the island, she remembers the apocalyptic landscape, the rooftops blown all over the place, and a huge boat embedded in the town hall.

The eye of the storm

Laeti’s education becomes more focused when she joins Knox college in Galesburg (Gale means storm burg- a town…), a place lost among the cornfields, two hours out of Chicago. She’s seventeen and she’ll stay there for four years. The college is also known for receiving Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas Debate. It’s also one of the stops of the famous underground railroad, the route used by the escaped slaves to flee to the North.

The Knox student body regroups all fifty states and thirty-six different countries. Each year, an international festival is organized, with live shows, live music and people cooking specialties from all over the world. Laeti improvises a Gwo Ka with her Indian friends.

Fluent in English, Laeti plays the part of the griot in Death and the King’s Horseman, written by Nigerian playwright Wolé Soyinka. “A woman griot? I’d like to se that…”, says contemptuously the author. Ambiguous reaction…

Laeti does everything at the same time: art, theater, design… “I didn’t want to limit myself to doing only one thing”. She ends up in the costume department of the theater program and practically lives there. That’s when she starts writing: bits of random poetry, free writing. The material she will later turn into songs.

Mali Musik

Salif Keita reminds Laeti of Canada. Her family listened to his music in the Great North. Salif toured in a nearby city and was invited for dinner, but was finally unable to come. It’s the first encounter, oceans and ages apart, with François-Marie and his older brother Pierre-Marie, who traveled to Mali, and through Kayes, on the rackety train to Senegal. They were searching for Toumani Diabaté, griot and kora player… an old friend of the flamenco musicians Pierre-Marie hung out with in Seville.

With talents like Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Cheick Tidiane Seck, the Super Rail Band of Bamako, Rokia Traoré, Amadou and Mariam, Mali is the ancestral cradle of all the African styles of music.

Like Dee Dee Bridgewater, many African-Americans decided to go to Mali to find their ancestral roots and achieve the delicate balance between jazz and traditional African music. There was a time when Mali was a great empire, today, it’s one of the world’s music capitals. Like a major of its own kind. Foreign artists flock to this small Sahel country, from Carlos Santana to Keziah Jones, to Damon Albarn, the lead singer of Blur, who crafted an album plainly called Mali Music.

During their inspirational journey, François-Marie and Pierre-Marie discover the n’goni, a traditional four-chords guitar, and the kora. This odyssey foreshadows their collaboration with Fatoumata Diawara and Christophe “Disco” Mink, a musician who plays with the very gifted Franco-Malian artist Rokia Traoré.

Black and White

François-Marie’s parents’ musical library is packed with British rock. Very early he was aware that the Rolling stones starting with Brian Jonas, gone too soon, and Keith Richards would never have existed without Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters (to whom they borrowed Mannish Man), Bo Diddley and the Southside blues from Chicago. Their hit Love in Vain, a song about legendary Robert Johnson… was written in 1937! Most of the Mod rock follows the same pattern, with The Animals, or Eric Clapton, who always said Curtis Mayfield, Ray Charles or the blues from Mississippi influenced him. Clapton is proud to have recorded an album with B.B. King. Even before that, Shout, produced by the Isley Brothers in 1959, would become the Twist and Shout from the Fabulous Four a few years later.

In the midst of racial segregation, young Elvis listened to gospel in the church of South Memphis, in the African-American neighborhood. When he signed a record deal with Sam Phillips, producer at Sun Records and friend of B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis knew he was in good hands. In the meantime, Serge Gainsbourg, self-proclaimed white negro, declared that black and white were not colors, but rather values. He dreamt himself as a jazz singer, but he made a living composing ballads. Very nice ballads.

The electrifying blues, “devil’s music” for the southern masters, mutated from gospel, to negro spiritual, to doo-wop to rhythm and blues, and was quickly turning into rock’n’roll, composed and written by whites. Today, the roles are sometimes reversed to the point where white hip-hopers from the Midwest see themselves as gangsta rappers and call each other niggers!

The mix of white and black was always an explosive one. But it allowed for musical crossing, the most beautiful invention of the last thirty years. On It will come around, the musical symbiosis of black Laeti and white François-Marie is yet another proof supporting that fact. “We know where we come from, says Laeti. We share it. It’s natural, it’s obvious. But it couldn’t have happened in the same way at any other moment in time.”

Sixties, Seventies and the Mitchells

Obviously, many composers and musicians have influenced the music of FM LÆTI : John Lennon and his magical albums Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, Stevie Wonder, Keith Richards and George Harrison, Billy Preston and Donny Hathaway, George Martin and Phil Spector, Aretha Franklin and Dorothy Ashby, Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney. What do they all have in common? They emerged in the sixties and seventies. Or even before that.

During the making of the album, François-Marie, Laeti and the other musicians confessed they extensively listened to the music of soulman Willie Mitchell, and most notably to his rhythmic and brass sections. To this day, this native of Mississippi -who played the trumpet on the first albums of B.B. King-, remains, alongside drummer Al Jackson, the most important architect of Al Green’s musical wonders. Since their very first collaboration, Green Is Blues, the brass section explodes, Al Jackson’s kick spices up the melody and allows for Al Green’s voice to sensually come in. Mitchell was the only one in charge of arrangements, sound recording and production. He gave Al Green some of his biggest hits in the seventies: I’m Still In Love With You, Let’s Stay Together, Love and Happiness and Call Me. But another Mitchell has influenced FM LÆTI in their quest for new sounds. Mitch Mitchell is one of the most influential drummer of the late sixties. He became a legend playing with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and gradually asserted his innovative style under the new name of “fusion”. His brought out the drums and did not let the base be the sole structuring element of the song. A priceless contribution to music.

But be reassured, David Byrne, Damon Albarn, Air and Morcheeba are also part of the band’s musical library, and they keep it up to date.

Girls sing better

From her first albums, Worlds & Sounds and Experience: Jill Scott (featuring Bilal and Erikah Badu), the young black diva from Philadelphia assertively introduced a new style, Nu Soul, with its extreme sensibility, its boasted elegance and its preference for the sound of words and delicate arpeggios over loud ostentatious beats or brutal raps.

Proclaimed heir of Aretha Franklin, Lauryn Hill of the Fugees crafts simple and incantatory spirituals. Her unconventional voice allows her to read poetry, murmur or chant. Her singing is strangely plaintive. But there’s also Janet Jackson, Macy Gray, Tracy Chapman or Joan Osborne, the voice of Motown. And Aretha Franklin or Etta James.

They’re all unique; they all invented their own world. But they share the same need to sing out their passions, their souls and their lives with courage and honesty. They’re Laeti’s big sisters, and with this album, Laeti follows in their footsteps. Her warm voice with a slightly broken veil reveals her tenderness and bruises on her soul. And she can manipulate that voice anyway she wants.

Pigalle at night

At first, it was a port full of migrants. And it still is. La Goutte d’Or, this dark unmarked territory, isn’t far away. The neighborhood pours out stories of disaffection, loneliness, lost children and bad boys. At 16, Laeti’s father was hanging out in those streets. He spent his days at La Baguetterie, a shop selling drums and drums kits, rue Victor Massé.

Laeti comes full circle when she gets there. During a period of three years, she spends a lot of time at a friend’s place, rue Condorcet, and has direct access to the cellars where jam sessions and improvised fiestas often take place until the wee hours of the morning.

Laeti falls in love with the North of Paris. She wanders from the Batignolles to the Gare du Nord, walks into jazz bars, like L’Étreinte, on rue Bleue. She makes new friends, writes lyrics and composesher own songs. And she meets FM for a jam session on Radio Campus. A new relationship ignites and rewards both partners. Bits of text spring from melody lines. They decide to record an album, a pure album, with a live vibe. Pigalle is also the name of Pierre-Marie’s label, the producer of FM LÆTI.

FM

In French, FM stands for Radio Frequency, the frequencies you try to pick up when you’re on the beach and all you have is an old transistor, on the Côte d’Azur for the summer, or in Guadeloupe. Anything works for those who are always yearning for new sounds and new inspirations to play music: jazz, pop, rock or good old popular music. All the musical tendencies. The first two songs of the album are describing this timeless quest for an eclectic musical inspiration. As a meticulous musicologist, François-Marie comments: “Rise in the sun is one of the first songs we wrote for this album. It was inspired by the pleasure we felt playing together the first times we met. We started with the melody and we improvised rhythms inspired by Stax or Motown. Drummer Steve Arguelles and bass player Christophe “Disco” Minck joined in and together, we tried to emulate the rhythmic sections of the sixties. The brass section and the voices brought the live and gospel vibe we were looking for. For Out of my hands, Laeti had written some lines and we started improvising like New Orleans bluesmen. The melody sprung pretty quickly, and the rest just followed. We wanted to create a musical atmosphere that would remind people of a thirties nightclub. We all worked together to find this old traveling circus arrangement that played up the disillusioned vibe of Laeti’s lyrics.”

FM also hints at the frequencies of the soul, the moods, and the shifting urges.

FM for frequency, and aquaintances as the initials of François-Marie, Laeti’s artistic alter ego, her partner in crime on this musical project.

It will all come around

The song that inspired the album’s name sounds like a peaceful mantra. As François-Marie sees it, it’s a very positive, sunny and cheerful project. “We all have ups and downs, it can be very hard to remain calm and optimistic when you go through difficult times. It will All come around is what we kept saying to comfort each other when we had doubts or when our energy was low.” The album’s first song, Rise in the sun, is the perfect illustration of that: “The mood of this song has influenced the writing, it came from our urge to shine a ray of sun all the way through to the listener’s heart. And not to let it slip away!”

Now, it’s time to promote the album. The tunes are catchy. They convey a vibrant happiness and the urge of the artists to express their joy, as if they had reached true peace after months of hardships. As Laeti says: “This album is the beginning of the rest of my life… it’s looking forward. Let’s hope the weather will be fine.”

The birth of a band

… more likely the birth of a tribe! A tribe built through a series of new additions. Pierre-Marie Dru, the man in charge of Pigalle Production, works two doors down from Bleeps, Stéphane “Alf” Briat’s studio, where all sorts of wonders (including Air’s songs) are being mixed from the basement of rue d’Enghien. But Pierre-Marie also worked with Yann Arnaud (the sound of Syd Matters) on the mixing of the Swedish movie Sound of Noise, for which he was soundtrack producer. Yann was very enthusiastic to share the sound maker’s? seat with his friend “Alf”. One was in charge of the recordings and editing, the other of the mix. They both fed on the other’s talent, they both had something to bring. “Alf” got the drummer Steve Arguelles on board, and Steve introduced Christophe “Disco” Minck, Rokia Traoré’s bass player, to the quickly growing gang. Christophe also plays the harp and the n’goni, a rare traditional string instrument. Keyboardist Laurian Daire jumped in, soon followed by Fatoumata Diawara, who graced one song with her powerful voice, Sébastien Llado (trombone and lambi) Sylvain Gontard (trumpet and bugle), Roberto Moreno (cavaquinho), Christophe Panzani (baritone sax and clarinet) and, finally, Kabinet Kanté, friend and guitar player… One by one, talents added up and, in the end, the whole squad was transported by the same energy. And was on its own joyful way, like the Merry Pranksters.

Laeti and François-Marie started this patchwork long before. They wrote lyrics and composed melodies on a pre-recorded base of bass and drums, before throwing out words and sentences they loved and adding musical notes. Sometimes, they worked the other way around, building harmonic lines and stitching words here and there.

Yann thought it would be great to record at La Frette studios (favored by Syd Matters, Feist and Gonzales… among others). Four days and four nights of sheer madness during the month of July. François-Marie brought all his guitars; “Disco” brought the bass, the string bass, the n’goni, the kora and the sitar. Yann and his friend Raphaël led the show and the band invested every inch of space, even the kitchen… They played with the windows open; it was hot and the barbecue was on. After that, they mixed for two weeks, at Bleeps, in October 2010, and the album was finished a few weeks later. The spirit of Willie Mitchell lives with the dream team. “Simply Beautiful”.

Produced byFrançois-Marie Dru, Pierre-Marie Dru

& Yann ArnaudLætitia Bourgeois

lead vocals, back-up vocalsFrançois-Marie Dru

lead vocals, back-up vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, Rhodes, Wurlitzer,

B3 organ, MoogSteve Arguelles

drums, percussions, tapChristophe « Disco » Minck

bass guitar, string bass, harp, n’goni, kamalengoni

Laurian DaireWurlitzer, B3 organ, piano

Sébastien Lladotrombone, lambi 

Christophe Panzanisaxophone, clarineSylvain Gontardtrumpet, bugle

Thierry Bellia et Jérôme DidelotOptigan, back-up vocals, ukulele

Christel M’Barga, Valérie Belinga, Guillaume Eyango, Eric Filet and Pierre-Marie Dru

back-up vocalsRoberto Moreno

cavaquinhoKabinet Kanté acoustic guitar

Fatoumata Diawara (« courtesy of World Circuit Records »)

vocalsAll music and lyrics by Laetitia Bourgeois

and François-Marie Dru, exceptI Got the Boogie and Sunshine on My Face /

music and lyrics by François-Marie Dru  Coco / lyrics by Laetitia Bourgeois and Fatoumata Diawara, music by Laetitia

Bourgeois and François-Marie Dru

Recorded and edited byYann Arnaud and Raphaël Seguin,

at La Frette StudiosMixed by “Alf” Briat at Studio Bleeps

Mastering by Chab at Studio TranslabArrangements by François-Marie Dru, except

Out of My hands, arrangements by Thierry Bellia, Jérôme Didelot and François-Marie Dru

Brass section arrangements by François-Marie Dru and Sébastien Llado

Photography by Vera PalsdottirStylist by Agniezka Baranowska

Make-up by Isak Helgasonraphics and album design by Atelier 25 (Capucine Merkenbrack & Chloé Tercé)

Produced by Pierre-Marie Dru for Pigalle Production :

www.pigalleproduction.comAll tracks licensed to Exclusive Wagram Music

FM LÆTI is represented by www.voyezmonproducteur.com

Credits