The pan-Mediterranean playlist of Crimi

A journey full of grooves from Palermo to Oran, from Italy to Algeria. It’s ‘Scuru Cauru’, the Crimi album released two days ago. They are French, but listening to their music one gets the idea that they live in an imaginary place in the Mediterranean that encompasses many and transcends them all. We asked frontman Julien Lesuisse, French of Sicilian origin, to compile for us a small playlist of songs that have influenced the group’s blend of funk, raï, ethno jazz, new wave and soul.

His voice goes straight to the heart. As with raï singers, it’s incredible to hear her deep knowledge and skill in using her voice. She too takes place in the classical music of India or Egypt, only here she discovered everything by herself, she learned by herself, on the street.

I saw a Cheikha Rabia concert one night in Paris when I was playing with Sofiane Saidi & Mazalda. She just sang, and there were only two other musicians on stage: one played the gallal (raï brother of the darbuka) while the other the gasba, the Algerian magic flute. I’ve never heard a concert so hot, so intense, so dancing. But not just any dance, it was just that slow and ruthless dance typical of raï.

“The girl with the mole” is an old song sung by the very young Cheb Khaled. A song that takes us back to the beginnings of raï, between Arabo-Andalusian and the music of the cheikhs, adapted for these young and fantastic voices. With raï it is wonderful how every singer can completely invent his own path, his own history, his own vision (raï also means “point of view”), relying however on a consolidated and profound tradition.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sincere intensity of Nino D’Angelo’s songs, and by his way of singing. And I’m talking about everything I’ve heard of him: the beginnings, the journey with Merola, up to the neo-melodic and the more “modern” things, like the album in which he sings the songs of Sergio Bruni. To be honest, I’m also a fan of what Nino D’Angelo has always told about Southern Italy.

Here too, I’ve always been in love with her voice, with her sharp timbre. There is this particular temperament in Neapolitan music, this nuance which is even more marked in Tony Bruni’s voice. It is something that has very little “Western” in it, it is something that speaks of the Maghreb, like a bridge that leads from southern Italy directly to northern Africa.

The most incredible thing for me is how Domenico Modugno, born in Puglia, wrote and sang some of the most beautiful Neapolitan and Sicilian songs. His imagination was his freedom. And when it seems strange to me to write songs directly inspired by the Sicilian language, I imagine Modugno playing with the particular fantasies and sensations that every other language brings to life, and which are unique, unambiguous, unobtainable.