How do you create an entire world from nothing but tones, sounds and rhythms? A world full of width and depth, full of colors, movements and manifestations, with different temperatures and divergent courses of time. On SulaMadiana, it only takes two musicians to form such a world.
SulaMadiana is a cornucopia, spilling out reverberations of Miles Davis, Gong, and previous works of Molvær, and yet Molvær and Cinelu open up doors to entirely new worlds. The album title is not some ancient spell, but a confession to the musicians’ respective biographies. Sula is the island from which Molvær stems, Madiana is a synonym for Martinique, where Cinelu’s father comes from. SulaMadiana combines all which is perceived as trusted, familiar, and achieved, with a notion of sounds beyond the horizon: glittering, shimmering, and always promising.
The individual roles on SulaMadiana are very flexible. Cinelu becomes a singer on his percussion, while Molvær’s electronically distorted sound surfaces inhabit an inconspicuously driving pulse. Cinelu plays acoustic guitar, Molvær conjures up drones on the electric guitar. The osmosis between the two musicians is enormous. “We are different, but what we have in common is that we like to give some space to things,” Molvær recaps. “I create space for him, he creates space for me, and we both create space for music.” Cinelu adds: “It doesn’t matter who has what share in music. We both know each other’s cultures, we find bridges and crossings, and often we walk these paths that lead in the same direction. We wrote everything together and followed our feelings. There are no limits or barriers.”
There are many ethnic and historical references on the album. Cinelu deliberately bows to his mentor, the late Manu Dibango, whom he calls a sage, to the recently deceased Afrobeat master Tony Allen, and to the jazz drummer Jimmy Cobb, who also left us just a few weeks ago, and with whom he shared the Miles Davis experience.
Nils Petter Molvær and Mino Cinelu had both come a long way in their careers before they met. Cinelu gained international renown on Miles Davis’ albums We Want Miles and Amandla. It is his percussive storytelling which gave these records their mystical depth and special spatial transparency. He has worked with Weather Report, and, until recently, Gong and with Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Sting, Santana, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. His album Quest Journey (2002) comes across like a collection of gripping short films. In 1995, together with Dave Holland and Kevin Eubanks, he had already sparked the magic of a complete sound world once before.
Nils Petter Molvær is one of the most outstanding figures in European jazz. In 1997, he made his debut with the CD Khmer, combining the Nordic feeling of nature with the Southeast Asian philosophy of sound. His journey into the uncharted areas of music spans almost a dozen records, on which he explored various combinations of acoustic and electrical sound generation. He worked with Berlin’s electronic producer Moritz von Oswald in 2013, with the reggae philosophers Sly & Robbie in 2018 and with Bill Laswell on several occasions.
The Norwegian trumpeter and the French percussionist represent two worlds, which – at first glance – could hardly be more different. Both are masters in the visualization of sound, and in changing the visible into the audible. Their musical home is the entire planet, but while Molvær’s hoarse and cloudy trumpet sound evokes boreal cold, Cinelu stands for the rhythmic fire of Latin America and Africa. On SulaMadiana, they finally found their common playground.
They first met in a cave in Cappadocia, Turkey, in 2015, where Molvær was performing a solo concert, and afterwards agreed on a joint project. It wasn’t until more meetings in different parts of the world and several years later that they finally got together for a studio session in Oslo: “The best way to start something is to start it,” Cinelu enthuses. “So I said: Let’s get started. Nils brought a groove along which I liked, we enriched it with sounds and other grooves, wanted to find a melody, and it just made ‘Bang’. It was a real trip. A lot of blood, sweat and tears, but even more love.” At the beginning of 2020, the recordings were rounded off in Cinelu’s studio in Brooklyn.
The post-production was confronted with new challenges. Because of the Corona pandemic, it had to take place separately in Brooklyn and Oslo, in a sort of transatlantic cooperation. This might have added even more space to the sound – however, it did not make it easier. “Without the intimate friendship that we developed in the course of this process, we would never have finished this project”, Cinelu summarizes.
SulaMadiana will easily make its stand amongst previous creations of unmistakable sound worlds, such as Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew or Pat Metheny’s and Lyle May’s As Falls Wichita So Falls Wichita Falls. In times like these, we take comfort in knowing there are still musicians around who keep an eye and ear on the world as a whole. The album is a world within itself, waiting to be discovered.