Kham Meslian, Ghosts… the future (Heavenly Sweetness, 2022)

to To be honest, one is rarely surprised when one is a music journalist. I should be able to count on the fingers of both hands the times I’ve written something on a completely unknown disc, choosing from a pile of titles to listen to. Most of the time, we do the work in advance and eagerly await good records: we have already heard a single, the first album, saw the artist on stage somewhere at a festival or in the first part. Or just listen carefully to the label. Or it’s a record of one group’s guitarist with another’s singer. But the surprise remains, each time, a fleeting moment that renews the endless quest that is the engine of this creation. So, thanks to Kham Meslian’s debut album, Ghosts… the futureArising out of the blue during a listening session.

Of course, this great record comes out of nowhere in the fifties, where he signed his first solo recording, but for a long time was the bassist of the Angevin group Lojo. Formed around the sounds of Denis Pian and the El Mourid sisters, founded in 1982 to mix sounds from French folklore with traditions from North Africa, South America, reggae or jazz, Submarine has been working on music for a long time. News, but it continues to fill rooms around the world, and those who’ve crossed its path know it’s a formidable school of music. This is evidenced by Kham Meslian, who played with Lojo for twenty years from 1997 to 2016, first the electric bass and then the double bass after falling in love with an instrument lying around in a theater in Grenoble. The group was staying.

Then he was a gifted classmate, never at the forefront but already captivating, the influence inherited from his Martinican father, Spanish mother or rock and rap adolescence in Angers slipping in everywhere. Until a poetry festival in 2019, which invited him with his double bass to accompany a reading and eventually asked him for a solo. This is the biggest challenge in the double bass, the natural sounding pillar in an ensemble, but it’s very difficult to express the sound alone to hold attention in more than three parts.