Created by Thierry Lalo in 1994, The Voice Messengers are more than 20 years of musical adventure: 3 albums, 1 Prix du Jazz Vocal (Académie du Jazz), 1 DVD, nearly 400 concerts in France and abroad, dozens of workshops, collaborations with many musicians, arrangers and vocal groups around the world, and numerous musical prizes.
Their new album “Comme le temps passe”, initially scheduled for June 2020, has been be released in January 2021.
Served by the jubilant arrangements of Thierry Lalo and other renowned arrangers: Jean-Loup Longnon, Edward Randell, Jesper Holm,… the Voice Messengers form a real vocal big-band (6 singers + a rhythm section) in which the role brass is held by the singers.
The writing plays in counterpoint to two or three different sections simultaneously, recalling the energy, color and above all the spirit of the great jazz orchestras, from Duke Ellington to Quincy Jones, including Count Basie and Buddy Rich.
Like the instrumentalists, the singers follow one another in turn to deliver their personal interpretation of an eclectic repertoire: a cocktail of rearranged standards, compositions by contemporary jazz musicians or extracts from musicals, with lyrics in English, French, or sometimes on pure onomatopoeia.
The Voice Messengers also perform a selection of poems set to music by Thierry Lalo. Poems drawn from the great French classics (Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Verlaine…) or from more unexpected authors such as Oscar Milosz or Marguerite Yourcenar. Another facet of the rapprochement between jazz and our language.
Everything takes shape on stage in a spirited manner, choreographed by Jean-Michel Fournereau.
Members: Augustin Ledieu, Emmanuel Laniece, Neima Naouri, Sylvain Bellegarde, Vanina de Franco, Stéphane Cochet, Vicky Rummler – Piano, Gilles Naturel – Contrebasse, Frédéric Delestré – Batterie
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