http://www.marine.futin.fr/

Dazzling, energetic and truly refreshing. Here are the first adjectives that come to our minds when listening to Qui Danse, the first album of Marine Futin, singer, guitarist, composer – or rather singer-songwriter – based in Brooklyn, headquarters of the most prominent jazz musicians. And it is about jazz in the record with pop and folk influences, which is immediately apparent when hearing the embroidered aerial arrangements by musicians: Nir Felder and Gilad Hekselman on guitars, Ziv Ravitz on drums and Or Baraket on bass.

The thirteen tracks on the record were composed throughout the last decade, in France, in the US, in China or India, where she spent several weeks touring in 2011. But it is in the heart of the Big Apple that all her songs were refined with an irrepressible desire to imbue her music with a typical New York energy, as shown by the ternary pulse in “Alphabet” which, in seconds, transports you to the intersection of 7th Avenue and Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and Afro-American music.

As she arrived alone in the urban jungle, without special acquaintances in the limited world of jazz, it took her several years to bring together the people needed to sublimate her dense and rhythmically taut lyrics, like the title track “Qui Danse” which takes the form of a funk on which musicians improvise and revel, evidently.

Newcomer to the international Francophone pop scene, Marine Futin is part of a still rare lineage of singers who devote as much attention to their texts as their accompaniments. At a time when pop and French music abandon musicians for software and other beatbox machines, Marine wanted to prove that it is still possible in 2015 to compose an entire acoustic yet fundamentally modern repertoire.