Interview Jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux Eva Rancho La Provincia 16 Nov 2013
With a blend of jazz, blues, pop and country carried by her heavenly voice, 39-year-old singer Madeleine Peyroux, American born but French by adoption, steps in tonight on Cuyás Theatre stage, which is sold out. Supported by three Canarian string musicians, she presents her 7th piece of work, The Blue Room, as a tribute to a meaningful artist to her childhood: Ray Charles and his Modern sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)
Madeleine Peyroux
Jazz singer
“I learnt Ray Charles’s values to blend different music styles”
Eva Rancho
LA PROVINCIA / LAS PALMAS DE GRAN CANARIA, 16 November 2013
What will the audience find in Gran Canaria gig within the Autumn Jazz Festival at Cuyás Theatre on Saturday?
They will find, hopefully, a connection. Music is sharing with an audience for me. It is the quintessential form of communication: instantaneous, immediate, unlimited, unentrenched, or loaded, universal and personal at once.
In which aspects does your latest album, The Blue Room, differ from your previous hits, such as Careless Love and Bare Bones? Does it have a social message of unity within this current economic downturn?
This album explores the path that Ray set out to build within a more contemporary context, if possible. This album is a chance to review what has changed for all of us in 50 years: one person’s experience can speak to all of us about who we are and where we’re going.
As you once said, Ray Charles has been like a footprint in your music soul in a way since you were an adolescent, 11 years old, when you moved from the United States to Paris. Why do you think he was more highly regarded in France than in USA in the 80s?
Ray Charles is one of the greatest singers and greatest musicians in American music. I don’t know if he is more regarded in France that in USA, but he is definitely top five for me. I learned his values of blending different music styles.
“I wouldn’t like to be stuck on the street without income like I was back then, because I am older now and kind of spoiled”
“The Blue Room’ is a chance to review what has changed for all of us in 50 years”
You were brought up among the sounds of Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Hanks Williams or Fats Domino. Apart from them, have you been influenced in your career by other world jazz artists, such as Django Reinhardt, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald or Diana Krall? Any other?
My parents listened to jazz and blues, American music that stayed with me forever so much, so that when I saw street musicians in Paris, I already knew the words to the songs they were playing in the street, songs like You’re Feets Too Big (Fats Waller) and La Vie En Rose (Edith Piaf) and Georgia (Hoagy Carmichael), etc.With musicians that could help me learn the more complicated chord structures of traditional blues and jazz, I started to enrich my musical knowledge with much more. It was like a school finally that would become a part of me, and I started teaching myself after that. Later, the idea of making a record was so foreign to me that I didn’t understand what I was going to do except for the exciting experience of working with musicians that I was sure knew more, and played more, than I. So I was hooked. Happily!
You began as a busker in Paris. Did people passing by your side inspire you in a way to compose?
Oh I’m still there, my music is still made of that sole of the sandal dust. My voice is still in the breezes wafting over the Seine. I’m nothing if not doomed to romanticism, even the angry kind. It is more about the music than the venue for me. Give me a street gig any day. But if people want to see me in a theatre, I absolutely adore it!
Taking into a count that music industry has considerably changed with digital era and nowadays it is harder for artists to sell as many albums as they used to, how has you adapted yourself to the new times?
I don’t care about record sales enough to know these things, though I am aware that budgets used to be insanely big and now things are incredibly confusing for people that don’t know how to work with small budgets and incredibly hard times for all the folks that are not working like they used to.
I suppose that I wouldn’t like to be stuck on the street without income like I was back then, because I am older now, and kind of spoiled. But I still do this for the same reasons as ever: to play with the best musicians, to learn from them, from the songs we play, and from the ears that listen. If I weren’t so lucky to come to Europe and play for the audiences that will have me in this world, I suppose I would have to find some where to play and if that were back on the street corner, well so be it!