Christian LAVISO Trio

The release of this album is also a creative inventor festive consecration late (47 years) and earned a musician much admired in his native Guadeloupe, but too little known elsewhere - even though he was selected last spring to lead the opening night of the festival Kreyol Factory in Paris / La Villette ...

Christian Laviso is indeed an exceptional artist, a virtuoso guitarist with a pretty phenomenal, after trying many other instruments: flugelhorn, piano, saxophone and drum especially "ka" the emblem of the musical identity Guadeloupe.

Raised by his grandmother Marie-Galante - island sugar plantation in the long history of slavery, which is a repository of living traditions of the archipelago - Laviso was immersed in the very early gwoka, well before attending some of his masters as Esnard Boisdur, Blachinot Kancel Konket or Guy.
Christian is the nephew of bassist Laviso Rosan, who introduced him to Gerard Lockel decade: a jazz musician who is probably the first to attempt to transpose the gwoka on guitar; figure of the independence movement, it is also a musicologist, author a treatise on the rhythms of ka and theorist "gwoka moden.
Christian Laviso Lockel inspired, but it teaches self-taught guitar.
Very attached to Guadeloup, he always refused to leave, as do many others, even though he knows that the archipelago is too small to make it easy to make a professional musician.

Formerly a member of the group Ka Lévé Horizon Simen Kontra then, it was not until 2002 that he founded his own trio, with drummer Aldo makè Middleton (who is also a percussionist complete) and drummer Sonny Troup, who knows perfectly the seven rhythms gwoka.

Laviso style, which he called "guitar-ka" is based on the legacy of the great improvisers of the guitar bebop, and here it is in line with the best - from Charlie Christian George Benson through Grant Green or Wes Montgomery.

However, the bebop and gwoka share a certain cult of velocity and virtuosity, along with the expressiveness and swing.

Osmosis here is ideal: Laviso inspired much of gwoka songs in his compositions and melodic language that the drums in the construction of his learned polyrhythmic improvisations.

He punctuates his songs with sheaves of notes flamboyant bouncing on the skins of the drums into a constant emulation.

Singing and drumming are also present in this album, including the beautiful "Bel Madanm La!"

where there are fever hypnotic sounds of these musical evenings which have so marked the guitarist in his early years.

Laviso is also the author of the lyrics of his songs in Creole, willingly activists, who speak almost always gwoka and Afro-Caribbean cultural identity in general - a beautiful instrumental trio, "Mi Mawiz", is dedicated the writer Maryse Conde.

But what is most striking (in the sense of the word) is so natural creative metamorphosis of ancient language of the drums in a music honestly modern, even futuristic, on the edge of free jazz.

It is not surprising that Christian Laviso has won the heart of two of the greatest contemporary jazz musicians: David Murray, with whom he collaborated for years, and leads his own fusion experiment between gwoka and jazz and hot Kenny Garrett former saxophonist for Miles Davis, who is unleashed here in four pieces, including one that gives the album its title:

"A Ti Moun Lafrik" meaning "we are all children of Africa."

- AFRICULTURES by " Gérald ARNAUD"

The great shows - especially with jazz bands - all have that defining moment. Its that instant where the proceedings break away from mere perfromance and slip, just perceptibly, into the realm of vocation, where the artiste has moved from merely playing or sounding good to becoming a force inseparable from the music.
At the Hilton Kingston poolside on Monday night (the dynamics of timing these musical offerings may yet need more tinkering), a commendably large gathering saw the Guadeloupean Christian Laviso (on guitars) and his three compadres make that transition on a number titled San Mele, from Laviso's latest album.
There was hardly any need for translation, as Laviso's musical language was sufficiently clear and eleqouent. He and his bandmates deftly blended more formal structures with the more open type of improvisations, the latter typically driven by the very able percussionist. Laviso also got some fascinating interpaly with saxophonist Luther Francois, who was on a homecoming of sorts. Francois, a St Lucian native, lived in Jamaica in the '80s whilst a student at the Jamaica School of Music. On tenor as well as on flute, he blew crisp yet unhurried lines that provided both compliment and counterpoint to the leader's "free-bop" strumming and the frenetic work of the drummer and percussionist.Prior to the headliners, The Maurice Gordon Trio brought a more conventional but no less welcome approach to modern improviation in their renditions of Gordon originals, the jaunty Ragamuffin Groove and the smoother Irie Moods. Their invigorating set closed with a reading of the Maytals' classic Bam Bam, stretched out but not to unprecedented limits. We've made no secret of our admiration for the work of the French Embassy and the Alliance Francaise in terms of both frequency and calibre of the presentations. Though the music proved too intense for some memebrs of the largely unsuspecting audience, this performance belongs right up there with the very best of them (a previous quartet, led by saxophonist Julien Lourau comes to mind). The value of these musical offerings can't be overstated especially as they offer not only the opportunity for a great listening experience but also to build the bridges between us and our diverse island neighbours.
- THE JAMAICA OBSERVER by "Michael A Edwards"

The percussive power of the guitarist from Guadeloup remains unequalled under his fingers the six strings is done claiming and protester!

He is a specific case in the guitarist of the French scene , in the broad sense. Because here is, this exceptionally gifted autodidact lives at Pointe à Pitre , thousands of kilometers from our ears. What does not prevent him from recording ,on his own, discs which start to have an echo beyond this ocean of imcompréhension. As a proof ,the relative success of his recent “Ti moun has lafrik”, subtle mixture of rhythmic fury and melody softness. Three years after initial an “Chaltouné”, unperceived past, this Guadeloupean gives in prospect the questioning inherent in his off-set people. With the voices coming from the traditional seraglio, the saxophonist Kenny GARRETT and a rhythmic pair the beater Sony Troupé, young talent to be followed and the drum Aldo Middleton, old friend from the years of trouble.
Since 2002, this trio constitutes the formation fetish of the guitarist, offering a rhythmic profusion to him which returns to his so particular manner to practise the six cords, to this percussive power which struck in full head the spirits of the jazz when people discovered it with David Murray's Gwoka Masters .But before he has arrived there Christian Laviso had kilometers of musics to the meter.

Born in Pointe à Pitre in 1962, he grows with his grandmother at Marie-Galante island, where he discovers “very original musicians and songs of labours which one could not hear on the radio”. At those time, the Creole language was forbidden,and the Republic was repressing in blood guadeloupean workers demonstrations and Edouard Glissant, the thinker of the creolisation was assigned at residence.
This mode “special bananier” will be the leaven of a new generation which will seek to conquer his freedom of expression.

That's the Seventies, where Laviso will be initiated with the jazz, “this feeling of freedom “ which he learns by his uncle Rosan bass player with the Club Méditteranée.
On his bedroom the kid dreams of beiing trumpet player then:
” My father did not want that I play music. I had to exert me in hiding-place, to make a drum and a guitar, with a wood end, a sardine pot and lines of fishing. Without bars, this instrument enabled me to play the quarter tones. I thought that the guitar spoke creole: a very dissonant spiritual sonority too."
Today, the adult thinks of finding this particular vibration, to rebuild this single model which he did not keep.

In his uncle's house , Christian especially will meet the guitarist Gerard Lockel, the father visionary of Gwoka Modern, a revolution in term of orchestration, the revalorization of the roots by the contributions of the free jazz.
“In addition to outstanding performances, Gerard Lockel completed a colossal work on Gwoka. He wrotes a Basic Treaty for all those which want to understand our music. I do not see how not to be heir to all that”

Just like he carrying the marks of the identity of “Mawons” this desire of independence which his spiritual fathers transmitted to him: Gwoka Masters like, Vélo, Robert Loyson or Rene Perrin, which played in the street.

Thirty years that Christian Laviso works to open the blinkers, as the majority of those which became ripe at the end them years 70.On the Eighties, he creates the Horizon group, still with the operation 30 years later. “It is to some extent a laboratory”
Three discs testify it all own-produced.Recorded in 2010, the next one fits in the traces of the events related to the LKP, 2009.
“In Guadeloup, the drum was always an instrument of dispute and communication, a means of telling our nonofficial history and at the same time of questioning us on ourself to advance. It is that I try to probe with my guitar." Not easy to make hear his divergence of style in an island where the cultural power maintain amnesia.

Not question of leaving Guadeloup for Christian Laviso “My space nourishes my creation, and then the young people from Guadeloup must be able to find in his own country references to persevere in the development of his culture”

His tenacity has an exemplary value. Christian Laviso survived as mechanic, in Carénage hot district of Pointe à Pitre while playing Gosier regularly, in the bar in edge of beach where he continues to occur. And then he made the great jump: ” he has chooses to pass pro full-time, moved by two decisive meetings with the turning of the years 2000.David Murray and Kenny Garrett, the two saxophonists offered an echo to his play with his funny metric and his ragor picking . “Between jazz and Gwoka, there are obvious bonds. Before the slave travel we are children of the same lines. American lost the drum. Not us, “Mawons”. That’s what they look after here: rhythms and melodies of the ancestrality!

- SO JAZZ "Jacques DENIS"