Saidi, Burger, Haddab, Orange Blossom… On Friday, Fiest’à Sète had set its sights on another possible

For thirty years on the road, the Orange Blossom group never ceases to impress! J.BE

For the third time in its 27th edition, the Fiest’ festival in Sète was sold out on Friday evening at the Théâtre de la Mer. It must be said that the line-up was as beautiful as it was daring, with the first act featuring the electronic-tinged raï’n’ roll project by Sofiane Saidi, Rodolphe Burger and Mehdi Haddab, and the second act featuring the orientalist and lyrical trip-hop of Orange Blossom. Very good trip!

Friday was a historic day at the Olympic Games with nine French medals, and not the least dazzling. While the sporting event continued into the evening, another, artistic event, was held at the Théâtre de la Mer, as part of Fiest in Sète, which did not contradict it, quite the contrary: the “Mademoiselle” project and the Orange Blossom group offered two additional images of France winning; a mixed and inventive France, open and combative, enlightened and generous!

Three strong-willed comrades

“Mademoiselle” is the project of three personalities so strong and singular that intellectual laziness, and its sad friend, the individualistic imagination, would soon have decreed their society impossible. With all due respect to them, Rodolphe Burger, Mehdi Haddab and Sofiane Saidi make common cause and their whole makes more than the sum of its parts ; which is saying something, considering they are respectively the singer who has been exploring literary rock for over three decades (and Kat Onoma), the electric oud virtuoso behind the groups Ekova, DuOud and Speed ​​Caravan and finally, the crooner and keyboardist who has been livening up raï for a good decade!

On Friday, the trio opened the evening: Vous êtes belle (mademoiselle), 504, One Two Three, Rani Whadi/I drink alone… the three “young ladies” chain together the raï’n’roll prototypes of their common repertoire engraved on the disc Mademoiselleand we already admire the class of the interlacing of the spoken-sung of the baritone Rodolphe Burger and the lyrical singing of the tenor Sofiane Saidi, at the same time as the beauty of their oriental blues produced by the sedimentation of robotic rhythms, synthetic layers of keyboards, on which fall electrified, filtered, saturated strings…

The nature of the concert changes with a distressed confession from Rodolphe Burger: “My mother died today, I dedicate this piece to her, a blues… I am with my two brothers here, I am with you in this sublime place. I dedicate this whole concert to her”. And the trio then deliver a haunted, twilight, terrible version of Embrasse Marie pour moi , a reiteration of the masterpiece Marie released on Rodolphe Burger's best album, No sport , in 2008. It seems to us then that the ornamented, serpentine, plaintive song of Sofiane Saidi assumes all the tears that the Alsatian giant refuses to shed for the moment, and it breaks our hearts.

An end of set of burning intensity

The rest is remarkable. And necessarily special. The Jimi Hendrix cover, Hey babe, is another phenomenal moment, progressing with an aristocratic and melancholic slowness, until a colossal solo by Mehdi Haddab on the electric oud, boosted by the wah-wah pedal (but not only), soon joined by Rodolphe Burger on the over-saturated Gibson SG. Sofiane Saidi calls for youyous, "cry of resistance in the face of all the hazards of life", and the version of Dédain that follows is of a post-industrial, apocalyptic savagery, crossing Kraftwerk, Suicide, Kat Onoma, Alain Bashung, Speed ​​Caravan, Mazalda… The best to decarbonize the pavilions, and the ventricles !

After two equally fantastic encores, Hard times and Njdoum, the audience, mostly come for Orange Blossom, understands that he didn't wait for “his” group, to be standing and in a trance. Yes, something happened. Mademoiselle.

A colorful, committed, inhabited collective

Little publicized, resistant to rhizo-social blather, Orange Blossom, a Nantes group led for thirty years by drummer Carlos Robles Arenas, is a sublime aberration such as only France produces and shelters. In addition to the traveling and committed rhythm player, the collective welcomes a violinist more lively and venerated than a Tasmanian devil, an eight-armed conguero (we counted), a Breton hurdy-gurdy player without blinkers, a post-punk and post-atomic guitarist, and on vocals, a Syrian refugee, Maria Hassan, to whom falls the delicate task of making us forget the Egyptian virtuoso Hend Ahmed Hassan.

Joy! The young and graceful singer reveals a stunning grace and a moving sincerity on the microphone, and it is thus without trembling that she can seize Ya Sîdî, a phenomenal, alter-global and devastating hit for anyone with a heart, from the album Under the Shade of Violets which is ten years old without a wrinkle. For the most part, however, it is the repertoire of the recent – and sumptuous – fourth opus –Spells from the Drunken Sirens, which Orange Blossom explores.

To reproduce the orchestral munificence, the collective undoubtedly abuses the sequencer a little (keyboards, brass and symphonic strings are pre-recorded) but the compositions are so powerful, and the conviction of the musicians on stage such that to quibble would be to lie about the evidence of its thrill, and its depth, and its constancy.

In short: this orientalist and scholarly trip-hop, tinged with electronic dub, libertarian trance and lyricism, is a constant treat classic. And once again, its hybrid nature, which agglomerates instruments, idioms, cultures and beings that a minority of sad minds would like to confine and divide, is the most intelligent answer to these, and the most smiling. As our excellent colleague from the Midi Libre sports department says in his "road diary" of the Olympic Games, "it’is France, baby" !