And by the end of each day, I am utterly spent. I’ve been trying to get to bed before midnight so I can wake up at 6am every morning. I have a tan (some real, some fake) and newly-blackened tresses. I’m writing thousands of words every day. Daytripping with my husband to Bear Mountain, secret rendez-vous with Veronica Varlow in a hidden restaurant, Saturday morning interviews with a new friend, co-hosting Hay House Radio with Gabrielle Bernstein, lazy park dates with Loulou Androlia and Jayne Rusby, private Pilates tutelage, a haircut, meditating in the mornings, interviewing with Srini for Blogcast FM, dinner dates with Sarah Wilson, oh, and did I mention it was our two year wedding anniversary on Monday?! And don’t forget to include Toustou in the Caravan.It has been an action-packed summer, to say the least, and the last two weeks have been totally over-the-top. The petulant voice of Colotis is booming again and the old friend Cyrille-Aimée is back on two songs. Tirelessly, the band tries new things, merges styles and makes creative decisions. It’s time to regroup in the studio… where fifteen vintage keyboards are waiting. Six months later, forty-something titles pile up. But they also rediscover thirties and forties swing jazz, artists like Fletcher Henderson, or the less mainstream musicians like Charlie Chavers and Mildred Bailey. They still love Massive Attack, they still dig the creative minds of Ninja Tune, Isolée’s minimal electro vibe or Gorillaz’s grand hip-hop rock bazaar. The basic rhythm of the first album has mutated into sophisticated beats, less gimmicky, more varied and enriched with sounds flirting with the frontiers of trip-hop. And when the others react instinctively, it’s generally a good sign. The same process starts over the next day. How do they come up with new songs? Every member of the band works in his own musical lab before exchanging files at night.
This has never happened before.īut during the autumn of 2010, they stop and take a month off to start thinking about the new album. The room is packed, people go crazy… listening to swing. The record is released a year later, and it’s an immediate hit. The word is out, their breakout song, Jolie Coquine, is playing everywhere. Terrified to be part of the gypsy jazz pantheon, they gather speed and steam and create a real posse (not unlike hip-hop) that follows them everywhere. And everything clicks in 2007, during the Django Reinhardt Festival in Samois. They start touring long before they even think about releasing an album. A few myspace posts later and they have almost doubled in size, enrolling Chapi and the boisterous Colotis in the band. And it’s far better than those retro futuristic sounds… because it swings. That’s where this peculiar mixture of classical Django and new trendy electro comes from. Charles, Arnaud and Hughes, the initial trio, dig swing, especially gypsy jazz, and try their hands at the genre’s traditional instruments: guitar, double bass and violin. Their strength lies in their common passion for electronic music. The surprise breakout band of the last decade, the apostles of Electro Swing and precursors of a laidback yet terribly upbeat trend, is coming up with an evocative second album: Panic! This time, Caravan Palace takes us even farther than their first album (that sold more than 150 000 copies) and continues an amazing adventure almost started by accident. Same Palace, with a brand new customized flavor. Here we go, let’s take the Caravan for another tour. The date is fast-approaching when Caravan Palace, one of the best electro-swing groups around, take over New York’s Best Buy Theater on April 2nd as a part of their North American Tour, including a stop at Coachella. Share: Share on Facebook Share on Twitter
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