2023-07-16 17:11:03
Jill Scott during the Essence Festival, July 1, 2023 in New Orleans, USA. AMY HARRIS / AMY HARRIS/INVISION/AP
The neo-soul movement created in the late 1990s seemed to have lost its following. The Grand Rex in Paris was however full, on Saturday July 15, to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest albums of this music, with Brown Sugar D’Angelo (1995) et Bedouinism by Erykah Badu (1997), poet and singer Jill Scott.
Featuring all eighteen songs from his iconic Who’s Jill Scott, Word and Sound Vol.1 (2000), she thus transformed the large hall of the Parisian cinema into a small club in Philadelphia, her city. This famous Five Spot, located in a steep alley of “South Philly”, which hosted Black Lily evenings in the late 1990s where slammers and singers came to compete with resident groups, The Roots and Kindred The Family Soul. It was in any case, this summer Saturday in Paris, the same public with the same look came to cheer him: dreadlocks mingling with afros, black tattooed bodies with white skin too exposed to the sun.
In the mid-1990s, artists from hip-hop, jazz schools or the spoken word decide to abandon the rhythm boxes of R’n’B, the aggressiveness of gangsta rap to return to a more organic, more soulful music with more artistic freedom, the pieces often emerging in jams between musicians. From the first minutes of her singing tour, Jill Scott insists: “Tonight, you will attend a concert with real musicians, playing live music, and you will see me go to this little table behind me to drink some water and taste some Cognac! »
No cheating
No cheating, therefore, no effect on the voice, autotune or soundtrack, commonplace today in most concerts, but a musical director pianist who overlooks the group surrounded by a percussionist and a drummer, a trumpeter, a flautist also organist, a bassist, a guitarist and three singers.
On the screen, archives of the daily life of black families in the United States, Zulu dances from South Africa mixed with the improvisations of African-American schoolchildren, the streets of North Philadelphia, where she was raised by his mother and grandmother and a reminder on the title, broth, from struggles against police violence in the United States, from demonstrations for civil rights to Black Lives Matter.
From the first notes of Do You Remember, the public sings each of the words in chorus, but the poetess will never let it take over, assuming her role as singer until the end with this little nuance that she recalls: “I am above all a poet who tells stories”. It was during an open scene of spoken world that the drummer of the Roots, Ahmir Questlove Thompson, discovered this young woman, inviting her to write with them in the studio. She will co-sign, You got Metheir biggest hit, telling the love story of rapper Black Thought and one of his fans, met at a concert in Paris.
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