Lagon Nwar: a borderless groove forged in Ouagadougou, La Réunion and Paris

Valentin Ceccaldi and Quentin Biardeau met during high school, and soon began playing music together in various groups. “We really grew up together, musically speaking”, says Ceccaldi. Mainly, they played in free jazz and experimental bands in France, but then four years ago, they decided that they wanted to work more with voices and songs that made people want to dance. Ceccaldi suggested recruiting Marcel Balboné, a musician from Burkina Faso whom he had met in 2015, when the two of them worked on the live music for a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Ouagadougou.

Soon after, that was exactly where they relocated, Ouagadougou, for a creative residency. They rented a place and started to work on the songs that would shape Lagon Nwar’s identity. “But after we came back to France, listening to those recordings, we thought they were really good, but were still missing an ingredient for the music to really work”, recalls Ceccaldi. At that point, Ceccaldi and Biardeau remembered having seen the singer Ann O’aro in a small Parisian club in Paris and being extremely moved by her performance. “We had kept her in the back of our minds, because at the time we had no project to offer her, but this time we could tell she was the last piece of the puzzle.” It took little more than a phone call for Ann O’aro to join the gang. And because she was a La Réunion native, they packed up their instruments once again and plunged into a second residency, this time in O’aro’s homeland.

Ceccaldi says that these sessions in Ougadougou and La Réunion “played a major role in creating the music” of Lagon Nwar, making the group distinct from a free jazz band born out of European culture. “We wanted to do something different and going to these other countries, with different cultures, that really nourished the project”, says the French bass player. “These are different cultures crossing ways,” adds Marcel Balboné, “and while doing so they embrace each other and rise as something quite special. That’s what we were looking for.” Balboné stresses the different tempos and languages brought by each other’s backgrounds. “It’s never monotonous”, he guarantees.

We meet at the release party for Lagon Nwar’s self-titled debut album at Paris’ Café de la Danse. There is an electrifying excitement in the air, heightened by the fact that just a few hours prior, the far-right French leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement and banned from running for office for the next five years. Lagon Nwar’s music is the opposite of Le Pen’s politics. “In the period we are living in, where borders tend to close again and sectarianism takes a stronger toll, we, quite on the contrary, are eager to live with the ideal of sharing.”

Their songs talk of unity and curiosity for the other, of slavery and colonialism – a guided tour in La Reúnion ignites the feverish ‘Liberté Connaître Oblige’ – while musically fusing jazz sax, African percussion, a repetitive (almost Gnawa-inspired) bass, red-hot keyboards and the hypnotic vocals of O’aro and Balboné. It is rather telling how these songs conquer mind and body when, at Café de la Danse, the audience keeps running to the stage to dance with the musicians. After all, this is music that gladly abolishes borders, designed for a common human experience.