Ladaniva

Ladaniva is the creation of Belarusso-Armenian singer Jaklin Baghdasaryan and French multi-instrumentalist, Louis Thomas, whose featured trumpet playing often recalls celebrated Franco-Lebanese musician, Ibrahim Maalouf. Baghdasaryan and Thomas met just before lockdown in Lille, where the former teaches singing at the MusicaLille music school, and their first two YouTube videos each garnered over a million views.

Their debut album carries on in the same vein with a rich global fusion rooted firmly in the singer’s Armenian folk tradition. The result is something almost as unclassifiable as, say, Enya or Natacha Atlas. The latter’s description of her own music as modern folk might serve Ladaniva’s diverse fair. The opening ‘Mamoushak’, for example, underpins Spanish-style acoustic guitar, Baghdasaryan’s beautiful Indian-classical-sounding voice and the Middle-Eastern timbre of Thomas’ trumpet with hand drums and jazzy double bass, while the following ‘Shakar’ has more of a bouncy Balkan flavour. The Spanish rumba feel of ‘Wayo Waya’ is followed by ‘Je T’Aime’, in which Baghdasaryan sounds like she has been singing in French all her life. ‘Ne Do Sna’ almost topples into reggae and the atmospheric ‘La Montagne’ suggests ‘El Condor Pasa’ as arranged for film by Ennio Morricone. Ladaniva is an album of many-coloured, multi-layered stuff, in other words, that portends a bright future.