Présente Des Extraits De Concerts Tirés D’Archives De 1969 à 1990

The late Gérard Lockel was, perhaps, the most significant figure in Guadeloupean gwo ka music. A towering figure within the genre, he wrote the book that would serve as a reference guide for the music, his Traité de Gwo Ka modènn (Treatise of Gwo Ka modènn), as well as a book on Guadeloupean politics and independence (1969-1989: twenty years of struggle). Those relationships between music and politics were finely turned in Lockel’s music, which had all the ferocity and expansiveness of free jazz and improvisation, allied to the polyrhythmic threshing of gwo ka (literally, ‘big drum’). You can hear those connections throughout this astonishing eight-disc set, which is starred by Lockel’s hyper-articulate guitar; his playing is just as comfortable etching out filigree phases and grooves, or stretching out into starchy, pinging tracts of freely played improvisation. The driving force behind the music is the group drumming, which undulates, gorgeously, a phalanx of percussionists swimming around the rhythmic core of a drum kit; wandering flute, or flecks of brass, shade in the contours of the various pieces. The music doesn’t so much ‘develop’ over its twenty-years as it does mutate, intricately, but the power of Lockel’s vision dominates. It’s extraordinary.