Moriarty on tour: Sorel-Tracy, Festival de la Gibelotte 05.07.2014 Smalltown, former industrial harbour, slightly decayed. A cargo ship seems to be parked in the middle of the houses, her rusty hull dwarfing all other buildings in town. A sturdy female sheriff in mirrored ray-bans welcomes us into town: the center – basically, three streets whose perspectives are blocked by concrete silos...
Moriarty on tour: Théâtre Maisonneuve. Montreal Jazz Festival, 4th of July, 2014. At last we get to see the inside of that giant brutalist concrete monster: le Théâtre Maisonneuve, built in 1967 by the architects David, Barott & Boulva, looming over the Place des Arts like an artificial cantilevered mountain. No magic inside, but big simple efficient functionalism. Huge foyers and public...
Moriarty on tour: Place de la Cité, Sherbrooke QC July 3rd, 2014. On the road to the east. Sherbrooke in the summer, students are gone, the streets look slightly deserted but for the drifters and oddballs at the crossroads. It’s our fourth concert here. We perform on the Place de la Cité, a great empty square surrounded by stone and concrete buildings, flanked by the tribunal. It’s...
Moriarty on tour, Paris-Montreal 01.07.2014
Dancing at the back of the airplane while cruising over the Atlantic. Back to Montreal, a few months after our winter tour: heat and sweat. Throngs of people walking up and down Rue Sainte-Catherine for the Jazz Festival. In the night, a concert of Burning Spear at the Metropolis.
Moriarty on tour: « Fugitives » with Don Cavalli & Wayne Standley, Café de la Danse, Paris, June 9th 2014. Landing in the familiar Bastille area, straight after a few days of touring the festivals. The great stone wall is still there, looming over us. We rehearse « Down In The Willow Garden » with Don Cavalli, and « Oklahoma Hills » with Wayne. The venue is sold-out, about three hundred...
Festival Son du Vignoble, Marigny-Brizay 08.06.2014. Leaving the highway, driving deep into the countryside north of Poitiers. Habitations troglodytes. Vineyards. Summer heat. Donkeys and geese. Wealthy farmhouse with wine cellars carved deep into the tuffstone ground. Tonight we play under a corrugated roof, a wine storage hangar. Reminds us of a festival in Vihiers, Anjou, years ago. The...
Le Bal Poussière, touring with Christine Salem and ger percussionists: Périgny, near La Rochelle. Blazing sunlight. Rona Hartner walking around with her daughter, father and puppy. A small stage in a park. The young festival is run by Yasmine & Pascal who setup the acoustic concert on the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle de la Rochelle a few years ago. Backstage we meet Minino Garai’s...
Moriarty with Christine Salem, « Le Bal Poussière » on tour: Festival Ingrédients, Ingré, June 6th 2014.
Somewhere near Orléans: wide meadow, towering trees, stray dog, construction site. Heat. While we set up and soundcheck, Jaquee sings on the other stage. Strange reminiscence of a festival in Australia.
Moriarty with Christine Salem: La Clef, St-Germain-en-Laye (F) 05.06.2014 Four days with Christine & les tontons Harry & David, singing songs together and spicing the food with piment-kombava. We play our songs written on the Reunion Island, like « Sakalav », « Lespwar », « Mikonepa ». New Moriarty songs too, like « Diamonds never die », boosted with new percussion beats. Lespwar Yelo...
Moriarty on tour: Théâtre Granada, Sherbrooke (Québec) 21.02.2014 Back on Sherbrooke’s main street at the beloved Théâtre Granada, its 1930s Broadway flair and somewhat weathered past glory. Slush and narrow brick side alleys, candles lighting up the tables in a cabaret manner, intimate crowd underneath the grand italian-esque decorum of the music-hall. Spanish revival style, said the...
Moriarty on tour: Théâtre du Petit-Champlain, Québec, February 20th 2014 Arrival in Québec City, straight into the old town and its funny Christmas-carrollian atmosphere. We carry the instruments through the cold air, up the old stairs leading to the Théâtre du Petit-Champlain. The whole place has changed since last year. It’s now setup to look as the legendary cabaret du Ti’Père, walls covered...
On the road to Québec City, with Regina at the wheel. The whole crew –Arthur, Thomas, Vincent, Zim, Morgan, Philippe Dupuy & Rosemary- tucked into a mighty Ford van, its V6 engine roaring. The white landscape unravels, as we drive over the Saint-Laurent we see the frozen waters and the empty lunapark and the steel girders of the bridges all stiffened by the cold, but the sun is shining bright...
A secret, improvised gig in a small bar in northern Paris… testing out new songs after weeks of seclusion inside our studio, working out ways to compose, decompose, recompose music. Old songs like “Cottonflower”, “Private Lily”, “I Will Do”, or “How Many Tides”, as well as the songs from our latest album “Fugitives”, were deconstructed and rebuilt in an acoustic way, in order to be able to...
The Babylon, nested into the furious Asmalı Mescit neighborhood, is a small but quite legendary club. Tonight it’s sold-out and packed with 400 people (That feels like a lot, even in the middle of the fourteen million inhabitants of the city). It’s our first « official » gig in front of the turkish audience, so we pull out a few old songs that we haven’t played in a while, like...
Early morning rendezvous on Istiklal Caddesi. The church of St-Antoine is an odd presence, a quote of venetian architecture grafted into the heart of Istanbul, a piece of old Europe . We settle in the courtyard and play an acoustic rendition of Private Lily, recorded on video for a turkish website. Maybe this old song could resonate in the contemporary context of this huge country, its inner and...
Moriarty on tour: Paris-Montréal, February 19th, 2014. Departure for the cold lands. Air Canada, Boeing 777 with few passengers in it and a surprisingly senior/elderly flight crew. As we are about to board, we talk about our journey to come, and a concert we will do in a place called Waterloo in Quebec… next to us, a lady turns around and says with a delightful accent: “Attention parce que ça...
First concert in Turkey for the band. Robinson Crusoe 389, a small bookstore on İstiklal Caddesi, sells carefully selected turkish and english-language books; they are threatened by the rising prices and rents of central Istanbul, and might soon close down… but who wants to see another Türkcell phone shop, or a global fashion store, taking the place of a beloved treasure-trove like this one...
Moriarty on tour: Istanbul, 30.10.2013 41’00″49N / 28’57″18E. Landing in Istanbul. İmmense suburbs sprawl across the Bosphorus, fourteen million people down there (seventeen million says the cab driver!). The most densely populated metropolis in Europe, second largest in the world after Shanghai. We settle in Beyoğlu, taking in the rythm of İstanbul, and slowly all those...
A cold wet night in Paris, but it’s sweltering hot inside the Cigale. Christine Salem opens the show with her percussionnists, aka les tontons, Harry & David, pounding some maloya beats and calling the spirits to rise. The three Mama Rosins then pick it up, merging the creole vibes from both sides of the planet. Then it’s Moriarty’s turn with the Fugitives’songs...
Moriarty on tour: acoustic concert in Mauritius (Indian Ocean) 04.03.2013. Flying in from the Reunion Island, hopping above the unreal depths of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius comes into sight through clouds and lagoons: spiky moutains and rocky outcrops jutting out of the flat earth and sea, like the teeth and spikes of a buried dragon. Then the aircraft flies low and takes a hard bank turn to the...