Loy Ehrlich’s music fusion

Itinerary of a trailblazer

Paris 

04/02/2011 - 

He likes to move around the musical map: from West African Cosmos to Band of Gnawa, taking in Touré Kunda and Hadouk Trio amongst others on the way: for nearly four decades, French musician Loy Ehrlich has enjoyed bringing the musical cultures of North and South closer.

It didn’t take him long to locate that famous record. Squatted before a row of vinyl LPs, after just a few seconds Erhlich pulled one out and held it high like a trophy of his youth. It was his first recording, made in 1973. The cover is totally blank. Ariel Kalma, the saxophonist who produced these three tracks in a duet, used to draw the outline of his hand on the cover when he sold a copy.

Then there’s the West African Cosmos LP that Loy participated in next. Released in 1976 on the CBS label, it appeared in the Marginal collection catalogue. The blurb on the back states that it was “created as an introduction to music and song movements outside the traditional circuit”. Those words set the tone.  On this musical oddball, the Parisian played with two Senegalese: Umban Ukset, the new name chosen by Emmanuel Gomez who made his reputation singing for the Dakar Star Band, and Wasis Diop.

Moroccan maiden voyage

When they met, the young Frenchman won them over by playing the tabla. He didn’t think twice about dropping Jacques Higelin, with whom he had been rehearsing for a while, and setting off on this new adventure with his Fender in tow. Alain was renamed Loy, “night bird” in Wolof. His taste for African music had been sparked by a voyage to Morocco that was “initiatory in every way” in 1972. Feeling both “lost and exalted by life”, the young man was a product of his times – the hippy era. “From 18 to 30, I lived without a penny, I just went with the flow,” he reminisces.

A love affair led him to Essaouira, where he discovered the Gnawa. On Marrakech’s Jamaa el Fna Square, an old Gnawi used to set up shop at nightfall. He would turn his bicycle upside down and play, often accompanied by karkabous (a type of metal castanets). “The effect on me was life-changing, as if it brought out a hidden side of me. I felt that I too could probably transmit the power of music,” Loy analyses today.  

So he made his decision: he would do what it took to make music. It was something he had been thinking of since childhood. His resources amounted to a dozen years studying classical piano and a bit of guitar, and an ability to turn his hand to most things. He started off with progressive rock – Alan Jack Civilisation, then Crium Delirium, and established some important friendships: with Louis Bertignac, not yet part of Téléphone, and Didier Malherbe, saxophonist with Gong and future member of the Hadouk Trio. “We became good friends in 1970. He was already an established musician, but I was looking after a goats to help the local farmers and earn a bit of cash,” he says, remembering the shack he bought in rural Provence.

Alan Peters and René Lacaille

When he said goodbye to West African Cosmos at the end of the seventies, it was to start afresh 10,000 kilometres away on Réunion Island. Alain Peters and René Lacaille’s group, Les Caméléons, were looking for a keyboard player. Loy bought a one-way ticket to the tropics, and played the paradoxical role of transmitting African music, which was little known on the island, to a band of musicians who swore by the sounds of King Crimson and Genesis. “With him, things changed fast. He played the piano and he had his sintir, an African bass lute,” René Lacaille looks back. 

The mainland Frenchman got on particularly well with Peters, who soon became inseparable from his takamba, the Sahelian guitar Loy gave him on his return from Timbuktu. He formed the group Carrousel, but returned to Paris after five years in the Indian Ocean, with the impression that he had accomplished what he wanted to do there.

He then got on the wagon that Touré Kunda had already set moving, solicited by one of Touré’s brothers who had played with West African Cosmos. The African tour, like the Casamance concert immortalised by the album Paris Ziguinchor Live, remains a powerful memory, due as much to the rock star welcome the group received as to the music they managed to cook up. “We completely mastered the repertoire, we were on really good form,” asserts Loy.

As soon as he felt the team spirit was fading, he decided to leave. Louis Bertignac was at the same stage with Téléphone, and suggested he join his new group, Les Visiteurs. The return to rock lasted two years. He had just decided to put an end to the partnership when the phone rang: it was Youssou N’Dour. He needed Loy to participate in the Amnesty International tour, with Peter Gabriel, Sting, Bruce Springsteen and the others. “Playing at Wembley in one of the biggest stadiums in the world was a real high point of that period for me.”

Hadouk trio

After playing sideman and stage musician, Loy felt the need to focus on his own world once more in the studio. He invited his accomplice Didier Malherbe to play on his 1993 solo album. The collaboration between the two men grew stronger and in 1995 they formed the Hadouk duo (a contraction of hajouj and doudouk, an Armenian oboe), which became a trio when Steve Shehan joined them. In 2008, they won the Victoire de la Musique award for jazz. “We try to create something new, with references to cultures from all round the world through the instruments we play,” Loy sums up.

His work for several years as creative director of the Essaouria music festival in Morocco saw him put together a project that meant a lot to him in 2007: to rework emblematic rock tracks from the seventies with Gnawa arrangements and musicians. “It’s a reference to my background and my influences at the time when everything started coming together: the hippies were bringing along western music and discovering local music at the same time.” In the ranks of the Band of Gnawa, an allusion to Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, can be found Louis Bertignac, Bumcello Cyril Atef’s drummer, and the Tunisian singer Akram Sedkaoui. The team gets together every year to perform a few concerts. “But we don’t have a career plan,” slips in Loy. “We just do it for fun.”

Bertrand  Lavaine

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper