Presented by ecoShuttle
July 2 at 5:55 PM on the Buick GMC of Beaverton Blues Stage
July 3 at 3:00 PM on the Bayou Blues Cruise
July 3 at 7:00 PM on the Crossroads Stage
“It’s as if everything I’ve done with my life until now led me to this moment.” The moment Pascal Danaë is talking about is when he realized Delgres was not just another project, but instead a turning point in his career. So, who exactly makes up the Delgres band behind their debut album? They are a French-Caribbean blues trio, a genre mainly sung in Creole nowadays, that came together four years ago after Pascal met the drummer Baptiste Brondy and the sousaphone player Rafgee. They represent a personal adventure, an inner journey for which music acts as the imaginary, although vibrant, a vehicle of private experience and family history as well as, more broadly speaking, the destiny of a part of the world marked by its rootlessness and identity struggles.
A singer, songwriter, composer and musician, Pascal has worked with Peter Gabriel, Youssou N’Dour, Laurent Voulzy, Neneh Cherry, Ayo and Gilberto Gil, to mention just the most famous among them. As a member of Delgres, he has attained the even more gratifying goal of achieving the perfect harmony between the emotional, historical and artistic dimensions of his personality. Delgres, a power trio that’s reinventing the blues by injecting an abrasive rock trans in it, recalling the Tuaregs’ soul as much as The Black Keys or John Lee Hooker’s, while carrying Louis Delgres’ secular message: his heroic fight against slavery in the Guadeloupe islands. This is how this rebellious and burning music means so much nowadays, by speaking to us through shivers and vibrating our bodies as well as our minds.
Delgres will host a Crossroads Conversation about Blues from the French Caribbean on July 3 at 7:00 PM.