THIEFS

« Graft » (La Greffe)

The leading French participatory jazz label, jazz&people is proud to present "Graft", the new album by the group THIEFS, featuring Gaël Faye, Mike Ladd and Aaron Parks.

THIEFS — deliberately misspelled — is a group that breaks the rules. Most at home tearing down musical barriers and smuggling sounds into the jazz cannon, this trio deals in grooves: beats that are a bit askew like the world that inspires them and transmuted sounds that create a breach between the acoustic and the electronic; a bastardized jazz spawned from the sounds and rhythms of the urban landscape.

Founded by French saxophonist Christophe Panzani and American bassist Keith Witty with drummer/vocalist Guillermo E. Brown, the group, following a first album praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, has now integrated drummer David Frazier, Jr. (Gabriel Garzon Montano), a lover of jazz and of hip hop, and inaugurated a series of collaborations with an array of artists such as pianist Aaron Parks (ECM), the poet and American MC Mike Ladd and the popular French-Rwandese rapper and best-selling novelist Gaël Faye, among others.

Neef_stoff_grafted2-1508775548

The title of their new album Graft (la Greffe) adopts this botanical metaphor in order to question notions of identity, origin and societal transformation in the face of countless and complex migratory movements.

The starting point was a residency in Metz, France (Arsenal/BAM) in 2015, focusing on family roots and the experience of being "uprooted": Christophe is the son of Italian immigrants who fled their devastated homeland, some of whom found refuge in the United States; Keith is the child of diverse elements within the Jewish diaspora, all colliding in New York City; and each of the group’s members have pertinent stories to share about the migrations that shaped their respective pathways throughout the world.

"I Live in Fear" feat. Gaël Faye & Mike Ladd - vidéo shot during Thiefs' artistic residency at BAM (Metz)

The image of botanical grafting—in which a foreign body is implanted in a host to obtain new flowers or fruits—expresses the paradox of a beneficial violence, of a forced marriage that turns out to be virtuous. The host (the rootstock) and the guest (the transplanted graft) end up as a single body and the initial notch heals to give birth to a new, vigorous and sometimes unexpected or unusual strain.

From exile to implantation, from the uprooting of lives to their rebuilding on different soil, wrought with fear, pain of separation, as well as nostalgia and hope, THIEFS proposes in Graft (La Greffe) a series of striking and powerful tracks that stretch mother tongues to their limits, dig deeply into the grooves and create positive counter-effects to these displaced, disrupted and reconstructed destinies.

Asserting the primacy and the universality of what it means to be a human being - both multiple and unique - the group has created music that is a synthesis of this image, a hybrid of multiple styles, flouting the boundaries of jazz, hiphop, electronica and the avant-garde through their rhythmic inventiveness, their improvisatory capacities, and their mastery of loops — proof that when grafting is successful, the result is much more powerful than the mere sum of two parts.

"New Jazz Vocabularies, a Bit of Elegance and Big Ideas" (The New York Times)

"The trio's statement that "THIEFS is a grammatically incoherent jazz bastardization" is true to form and results in an enjoyable debut that is both exploratory and modernistic." (All About Jazz)

"Thiefs pratique un jazz d'anticipation qui décoiffe." (Music Story)

L'ALBUM

Jazzandpeople_thiefs_panzani_recto3000rvb_72dpi-1508862783

1. The Limbs They Acquired Over Years and Continents

2. I Live in Fear (feat. Mike Ladd and Gaël Faye)

3. Fields (feat. Mike Ladd)

4. Pas d'ici - part 1 (feat. Gaël Faye and David Frazier)

5. IWBAH

6. Beat One (feat. Greg Santiago and Edgar Sekloka)

7. Anthro (feat. Guillermo E. Brown)

8. Pas d'ici - part 2 (feat. Mike Ladd and Aaron Parks)

9. Make a Fist

10. The Leaf Node (feat. Gaël Faye)

11. Pas d'ici - part 3

Christophe Panzani - saxophone, woodwinds, electronics

Keith Witty - upright bass, electronics

David Frazier Jr. - acoustic & electric drums

featuring

Aaron Parks - piano & keyboards (on 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10)

Mike Ladd - vocals (on 2, 3, 8)

Gaël Faye - vocals (on 2, 4, 10)

Guillermo E. Brown - vocals (on 6, 7)

Grey Santiago - vocals (on 6)

Edgar Sekloka - vocals (on 6)

Produced by Keith Witty & Christophe Panzani for The Drops Music

Recorded by Jason Candler at The Speakeasy, NYC

&

Andy Taub at Brooklyn Recording, NYC

Mixed by

Keith Witty & David Darlington at Bass Hit Recording, NYC

Mastered by

Kevin Peterson at The Mastering Palace, NYC

Artwork by Christophe Panzani

Photography by Simon Tailleu

Graphic Design by Olivier Linden

Thiefs "Graft"