OZMA QUINTET« THE DAY WE DECIDED TO LIVE AT NIGHT »

An intimate album by drummer and leader Stéphane Scharlé, a new opus that marks a major turning point in the band's history.

After five years of silence, OZMA returns with THE DAY WE DECIDED TO LIVE AT NIGHT, an intimate album written by drummer and leader Stéphane Scharlé, a new opus that marks a major turning point in the band’s history.

Although this is Stéphane Scharlé’s most personal composition, it is also the band’s most collaborative album. With his long-time partner, bassist Edouard Séro-Guillaume, he welcomes a new line-up with a breath of young talent: Musina Ebobissé on saxophone, Martin Ferreyros on guitar and, new to the instrumentarium, Dan Jouravsky on keyboards, replacing the trombone.

He also invites guest artists from very different planets in his cosmogony, creating an audacious mix of jazz, metal and rock, his artistic roots, but also Peul music, Oriental voices and electro, his more recent passions. So many layers that cohabit in a material of communicative joy.

The Syrian singer Lynn Adib, with her maternal and spectral delicacy on “Amours Volatiles” offers OZMA probably one of its most beautiful ballads. Without transition, it’s time for “Metalycra”, an exhilarating playground for experimental flautist Delphine Joussein, member of the women’s trio Nout, and for the seven sharp strings of Thomas Ketterer, a metal guitarist Stéphane met in the early days of OZMA.

Another fraternal friendship is the Peul flautist Dramane Dembélé, met by Stéphane Scharlé in Burkina Faso in 2008, with whom he founded the Sarkaba quartet. His unbridled melodies, played in question-and-answer mode on “Rapide et Furieuse”, illuminate one of the most intense tracks
on the album….

Meritxell Neddermann, the Spanish keyboardist and singer with whom Stéphane Scharlé has performed as a duo, sublimates the aquatic track “Quadratisch” with a dozen tracks of keyboards and vocoder, giving the album a peaceful, bewitching finale.

The album’s visual universe is also the fruit of a fertile collaboration with visual artist Andrea Ciulu (@andreaciulu), who describes himself as an AI Art Explorer. The thirteen tracks are accompanied with a booklet of 20 black-and-white images generated by artificial intelligence: futuristic, dilapidated urban landscapes, whales floating above skyscrapers, distorted architecture and the recurring figure of a snake as a symbol of resistance. A parallel visual narrative, mirroring current crises and their imminent exacerbations.