Comandante, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela Rory Carroll

Milton Chesley Carroll American singer and songwriter born in Texas.

Rory Gallagher restera à jamais un des bluesmen blancs les plus rock’n’roll, une bête de scène habitée par sa musique. Le regretté guitariste irlandais entré depuis dans la légende ne sait plus vraiment ce dont il a envie quand vient l’occasion d’enregistrer son septième album.Nous sommes en 1977. Gallagher a récolté de très belles critiques avec son Calling Card sorti l’année précédente. Mais il lui manquait un album à l’Américaine pour satisfaire ses propres désirs de production plus léchée. L’occasion se présente alors et Rory en profite. Le fiévreux musicien et son groupe se rendent à San Francisco en fin d’année pour bosser avec le producteur Elliot Mazer. Un scénario idéal.

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Liane Carroll’s talents, as singer, pianist and all-round musical force of nature, seemed to defy all efforts to capture them successfully on record. Until, that is, she began working with producer James McMillan. This, their fourth album together, displays a characteristic mixture of deceptive simplicity and emotional depth. Following the loose theme of attitudes to love, Carroll calls on songs by, among others, Stevie Wonder, Tom Waits, Jacques Brel and Hoagy Carmichael, whose I Get Along Without You Very Well provides the most touching moment.

The best musicians transcend styles and techniques. They deliver their hearts and souls, connecting on a primal level, one on one with each and every listener. Karen Carroll is just such an artist and one of the most universal artists to come on the scene since Nina Simone. Within one line she can lay down the grit of Howlin' Wolf stroked by the sass of Sarah Vaughan.

‘The dreamer! That double of our existence, that chiaroscuro of the thinking being’, wrote Gaston Bachelard in 1961. ‘The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in that chiaroscuro, monsters appear’, adds Antonio Gramsci. Sandrine Piau has chosen to use these two quotations as an epigraph to her new recording: ‘My family and friends know about this obsession that never leaves me completely. The antagonism between light and darkness. The chiaroscuro, the space in between…’