Crimi is all about the soul that flows, the kind of groove that oozes the sticky funk of New Orleans and the influences of Algerian raï, not forgetting the less upbeat, more melancholic passages.
Crimi is above all a personal story: that of a kid growing up in Lyon whose Sicilian grandmother hummed tunes from times gone by. This is how the saxophonist and singer Julien Lesuisse fertilises found his groove, which he likes to call Sicilian soul. It is also unsurprising to hear oriental styles here, a lyricism in full bloom that references Lesuissefertilises’ trips to Oran with Mazalda.
Crimi is a desire to revive tradition through original songs, strong melodies carried by a collective sound that resists the confines of labeling. The result is a trad-modern soundtrack, which is both very structured and very free at the same time.
Right now, Crimi is Luci e guai, the first album to be released by Airfono in April 2021. The track, ‘Light and confusion’, has a procedural quality and seems to say that nothing is ever as simple as it seems, in language as well as in music. In other words, this song is the perfect way to weave together all the threads that make up the complexity of a personality, from jazz to song, from the day before yesterday to tomorrow, from here to elsewhere.
