Jozef Dumoulin: keyboards, effects and programming
Sanne Van Hek: trumpet
Jean-Luc Lehr: electric bass
Maxime Zampieri: drums
Recorded and mixed by Julien Reyboz in june 2010 (Paris)
Mastering by Raphael Jonin
Malik Mezzadri grew up in Guadeloupe where he began to play flute and transverse flute at the age of 6. He quit Guadeloupe for Marseille at 17 and graduated from the Marseille music Academy being the first flutist.
After 10 years playing with Human Spirit, he founded his first Magic Malik Orchestra and released his first album in 1997 called HWI Project (Salam Aleikum).
He recorded in 2000 the 69 96 album (Label bleu). In 2003 Malik released his double album 00-237 XP-1. With the Malic Malik Orchestra he offers in 2004 an album named 13 XP Song’s Book. In 2008, he released a new album called Saoule made in quintet. And in 2011 he recorded for the first time in quartet, Short Cuts via the label Bee Jazz.
Malik has recorded and composed with many musicians from the new generation: M, Bumcello, Camille, Pierrick Pedron, Aka Moon, Booster. Recently he worked with Hocus Pocus, Air, Oumou Sangaré.
Malik comes out from one year of residence at the prestigious Villa Medicis in Rome with Gilbert Nouno.
This stay at the Villa allowed him to do an introspection; he is now looking for a more contemporary music. Now that his musical approach has been, in a way, theorized, he wants to put his approach into another musical genre and in the written music tradition.
With Alternate Steps Malik closes the jazz file and is now looking for something more empirical and less formal.
Alternate Steps refers to the alternative era and to the John Coltrane master piece Giant Steps; in this album Magic Malik shows us his influences with this compositions. The album has been recorded at the same place than Short Cuts, Studio 440 at Montreuil (France), where the musicians could record together in the same room as in live conditions. The live notion is really important, this disc is considered as the succession of the album live at Sunset Bingo (2009), recorded with the same musicians.
Close to alternative music by his flute touch but also to jazz by his training, Malik created his own kind of language with the XP which seems to match the idea of old-time jazzmen musical language. A musical language that allows the songs’ continuity, and a certain form of heritage as well as tradition’s respect.
This album is, for Malik, the end of a story, he closes a chapter, this disc is as important as his very first one.
The fact that the album is only being released now (he recorded it two years ago), and that the musicians are not together anymore allows to close the page of a memories album where the last missing picture gets is importance, this picture is Alternate Steps.
Bee Jazz
