His first love, the piano-voice, caught up with him. “I am a pianist at heart. I put the piano aside because I learned to play the guitar with Tryo.”
You’ve been warned, there’s no point in looking for a let-go side. In “I’m Taking You,” Christophe Mali’s universe is openly sensitive, yet playful and enthusiastic. His album talks about love stories, abandonment, absence, desire, and loss. “I like writing love songs. In any case, I like to,” the musician tenderly confides.
What is this muse that inspires him with these words? Christophe Mali’s pen is transported, inspired to deliver highly personal lyrical texts, carried by bossa drum n’ bass tunes, jazz, guitar, and piano… Texts filled with sunshine and a joy of living, with feelings as their only commitment. “Without love/ Being a futile image/ Useless existence/ Waiting at the crossroads…”
There you have it, it’s said, love makes Christophe Mali’s world go round. Love in all its links, excessive, for women and men, beyond origins, prejudices, and divides. “Rose des Sables,” offered to the Muslim woman, “Lili,” to all lovers, “Young Man,” to gay love, “Chameleon,” to all those who live awaiting a soulmate, “L’absence de toi,” to all the broken hearts…
In the manner of the surrealists, Mali the trickster sprinkled his texts with double meanings, innuendos, and enigmas. The temptation to decipher them… Then, simply the pleasure of that raspy voice, the words that follow one another, fly, crackle, sway. Mali loves the language and it gives back to him. “L’absence de toi: it’s my body that cracks/ my body that bursts/ it’s the grenade that cracks/ ripened in the sun and that wets my fingers…”
The musician dreams of writing a musical. But it’s already present in his shows. Because the artist doesn’t just sing, he stages performances. With talent and a certain know-how, inherited from his other life, that of an actor. On stage, he’s a live wire who without reason dives into contagious laughter, invites participation, snaps his fingers, makes the sign of the cross, provokes, and moves, moves, moves… “It’s the same person in a new setting,” he defends himself. “The suit and tie are to fog the trail. To take the spectators where they do not expect.”
Writing lyrical texts is an exercise of style that Mali masters effortlessly. He has the secret of refrains ready to hum, like in Lili: “How lucky I was/ When Lili walked beside me…” But also the rare talent to jump from one topic to another without hindrance.
In the album, two songs stand out. “The Priest of My Chapel,” “a song that takes us to the backwoods of France, to the somewhat dissolute chapel priest” and “We Don’t Care,” an assessment of the state of the planet. Necessary tributes to Tryo. To show that things are not over between them. “My solo career doesn’t at all mean the end of the group, those are bad rumors. We’re actually going to release an album in 2007 and it’s back on for ten years. Minimum!“
