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hello, Ray Lema, it is with a renewed pleasure that we welcome you in the art section of Flashmag. The last time we had an interview, it was in August 2012, we then reviewed your rich career that continues to dazzle music lovers around the world. Ray Lema it’s more than 40 years of musical career, and about twenty albums and an untold number of collaborations. So, the first question that comes to one mind when meeting a sacred monster of world music is after so many years at the top, what continues to motivate you?
Flashmag October 2018 www.flashmag.net
Ray Lema: first of all, the love of music, the passion of music when as instrumentalist we navigate in a universe, we fall in love with something and often we do not know until where it will take us. It’s this perpetual discovery, this permanent learning, that help this passion to remain an unquenchable thirst. The composition and the musical writing go beyond the work of the vocalists, because it is necessary each time to create, and one always learns something new, until today I consider myself a student.
The possibilities are endless with sounds?
(Laughs) absolutely
In recent years we have seen you as usual exploring the boundaries of music from the more classical style with your collaboration with the Rio Symphony Orchestra, to a Jazz more open with your quintet. So, when you admit that the Jazz is above all an attitude like stated earlier, by one of your illustrious colleague Miles Davis, what do you mean by that?
At the beginning Jazz was a music that was not stratified. There was nothing codified and then little by little the founding fathers allowed it to enter schools, institutes and eventually it became a highly codified and categorized music. The American Jazz. Also, when I repeat this sentence of Miles Davis “Jazz is an attitude” that implies that I can play African rhythms in an attitude of musical freedom and call it Jazz, because you know the so-called American Jazz, does not always fit
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Ray Lema new album
Transcendance
Interview
credit Photo: Emmanuel Bouvet