Asaf Avidan
With 7 gold and platinum discs in more than 15 countries, the singer with the golden voice is beginning a new chapter on stage, surrounded this time by his entire band.
Asaf Avidan is back. Following 3 years of concerts in small venues, the singer-songwriter is getting back on the big stages along with his musicians. And it’s not one, but two new albums that have been announced this time, including Unfurl, released on 10 October.
Asaf Avidan first became known with his band Asaf Avidan & The Mojos, launched onto the international scene by the hit One Day, before pursuing a solo career with albums such as Different Pulses (2013) and Gold Shadow (2015).
Loved for his intimate lyrics, delivered by his moving and visceral androgynous voice, the musician is offering a new show in 2025. A concert that combines styles - folk, jazz, blues, rock, pop, and even rap - and draws from both his rich repertoire and his recent creations.
To summarise all of Asaf Avidan’s good points, the New York Times once described him as: “An artist who writes like Leonard Cohen, sings like Robert Plant, and has the charisma of a cabaret dancer.”
While this is a flattering comparison, Asaf Avidan has indeed asserted himself as a unique and independent figure. An artist to the very end, he still refuses to use computers, auto-tune or playbacks. Each concert is therefore a live, sincere, raw and authentic musical act. An experience brought by one of the most outstanding performers of his generation.
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Les égarés
Nominated at the Victoires du Jazz in 2024, with their musical lines, these goldsmiths elicit shared landscapes where jazz and traditional music intersect, in osmosis.
They played together for the first time on the hill at Nuits de Fourvière in Lyon in 2019, without rehearsing beforehand. That afternoon, under an arbour that sheltered them from the relentless heat, they began to jam for the joy of it and the music flowed like a clear spring.
In memory of striking this well, the quartet was formed. The joining of two acoustic duos: one formed by Vincent Segal on cello and Ballaké Sissoko on kora, the other by Vincent Peirani on accordion and Emile Parisien on saxophone.
When their first album Les Égarés was released in 2023, the quartet gave more than 150 concerts in Europe as well as in the United States. A space in which to play, a poetic asylum for these distinct individualities that put aside their egos to serve something in common, performing organic feats of prowess without displaying them as such.
Neither jazz nor traditional, neither chamber music nor avant-garde, although it contains something of all of these, Les Égarés is a gift for the ears, where virtuosity lies in the art of delivering a song with four voices.
There are no drums or percussion; and yet there is a pulsation that can be felt, a peace that is not meekly consensual but, it must be said, packs a punch.
From kora themes that the counter-melodies of the other instruments gently envelop, and the Coltrane-style trance raised by the accordion and soprano sax, these four men continue an ancestral blues by infusing it with the sway of a lullaby, and it is a thing of rare beauty!
