Madeleine & Salomon is the encounter of two artists with distinct musical backgrounds: the composer and pianist Alexandre Saada and the vocalist and flutist Clotilde Rullaud. Six years after their acclaimed first album, A Woman’s Journey, the duo releases its second album, Eastern Spring. Although this new album pays homage to the militant Middle Eastern pop of the 1960s-1970s – all gems, though most are unknown in the West – one recognises certain intonations of the previous album, which was devoted to the leading politically-aware songstresses of the American canon.
With a pronounced taste for minimalism, Madeleine & Salomon once again works like a charm, delivering in the power of the voice, the imagination and the possibility of a music that augments the myriad of stories that songs convey from Morocco to Türkiye. Singing in English and sometimes in French, they echo the existential interrogations, the hopes and the contestations of a youth thirsting for change. Whether romantic, dreamy or militant, all of these songs engage in the sort of social or spiritual interrogation that still matters today, wherever you are in the world.
