World Music Show host & producer Ian Stewart interviews Pascal Danae’ on the show this week, in which they talk about Napoleon, the history behind the band’s name and what part of Danae’s past led to creating the band and why the sousaphone is a good replacement for a bass guitar.
But I felt something change
And they told you
Your heart
Your heart started bleeding, mom
These are words from “Ke Aw (Your Heart),” a seductive, dreamy waltz and one of the gentler songs on this album. The set kicks off with “4 ed maten (4:00 AM)” a salute to a worker toiling in winter to send money home. The music recalls “The Sopranos Theme Song” on steroids, rumbling over Creole percussion. Danai is a superb guitarist with an alluring range of sounds at his disposal, from rocking roars to delicately chiming arpeggios. Every step of the way, he is deeply in synch with his accompanists, drummer Baptiste Brondy and on sousaphone, Rafgee.
9 April 2021
An immigrant worker rises at four in the morning, stuffs newspaper in his boots to keep out snow, and goes to a backbreaking job where he must ignore the names he’s called. A mother demands to know what other children said to her child at the playground; the child refuses because “those words burn my heart”. A refugee who spent 100 days at sea with the hope of breaking old chains laments that “in La Rochelle harbor I broke my dreams”. Another immigrant worker, whose papers have been stolen, works off the books and is treated “like a dog” by churchgoers who “call themselves Christian”.