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Written in Folk Roots issue 165, 1997

MARILIS ORIONAA
Ça-i!
La Voce 710728 (1996)

She’s from Béarn, in south-west France to the east of Les Landes and north of the Basque Lapurdi, and this is a splendidly bold and individualistic album.
      Opening with a solo repeat-echoed vocal drawing on herders’ calls, then into a fast song, accompanied by Olivier Kléber-Lavigne’s flamenco-inflected guitar and Nicolas Martin-Sagarra’s tapping percussion, about the Spanish wind from the south and its alleged powerful effects on fecundity, going on, in Balansun, to list the names of the old houses in her village, it’s all sung (and sometimes spoken-sung) in the language of Béarn, in a voice sometimes natural-speaking, sometimes dramatic, with occasional echoes of a Piaf vibrato, sometimes melismatic in a way that suggests the music of her childhood home in Greece.
      Marilis Orionaa is that new kind of traditional singer - she is her own tradition, not slavishly fixing on an accident of birth but drawing on and celebrating what formed her and what’s around her.
      And some of those influences and surroundings find their way in a raw state onto the album - not sampled and blended, just - there. Someone called Georges recounts an argument between her grandparents about a mushroom omelette, a young girl’s voice (or is it Marilis’?) tells a fragment of Pyrenean mythology, there’s a burst of Kléber-Lavigne (the organiser of the album’s remarkable arrangements of guitar, percussion and Martine Urbain’s double bass, as stark yet rich and commanding as the vocals) throat-singing at a gig in Belgium, and - can it be? - Jacques Brel plays a traffic-accompanied solo in Béarn’s main city, Pau, on musical saw.
      It’s wonderfully liberated and liberating, a great way to make an album - at least it is if you’re as clearly talented and full of strength and life as Orionaa.


© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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