Cultura Voice

  IOAN STREBA COSMOPOLITE – GYPSY BLUES #2 Sunset Sunside 21 Novembre - Paris Label Plaza Mayor Company, Distribution The Orchard-Sony Music - Inouie Distribution If you do not yet know Ioan Streba and his Gypsy Blues, you will be in front of major discoveries listening to his new album! Of Romanian origin, Ioan Streba has lived in France for more than 25 years. Very quickly, he was one of the key sidemen of the greatest, on stage and in their albums: Biréli Lagrène, Angelo Debarre, Stochelo Rosenberg, Didier Lockwood, Thomas Dutronc, ...  Ioan Streba on Spotify He has performed in all major venues and festivals, both in France and abroad. In Jazz, in addition to the masters he has accompanied, his influences are Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, who constantly inspire his new themes and infinite variations of his choruses in explosive crosses with his Gypsy ancestry and Balkan traditions. Together with some of his compatriots, Ioan Streba is at the fo...

  Stéphane Sassi – Album “Serge” At the sources of influence... Stéphane Sassi is a versatile musician: composer, arranger, jazz pianist, director and producer. He presents us a new album, "Serge", in tribute to his father who died in September 2021. For this album where he plays the piano, he has surrounded himself with accomplices who are also high-flying musicians: we find Laurent Agnès on trumpet, Pascal Faidy on tenor sax, Yannick Harnois on accordion, Nolwenn Leizour on double bass, Christophe Beausset on drums and Jean-Marc Pierna on percussion. His repertoire consists of original compositions.  It is an album revolving around Jazz that offers us a very lively music with varied arrangements in trio, quartet or quintet, colored with atmospheres ranging from jazz musette to swing through samba. Serge on Spotify Stéphane Sassi offers us a journey to the sources of his influences and his roots, a musical culmination of nearly 18 months where he led the project ...

 There was some behind-the-scenes debate this week as to what Sony Music paid to buy a majority-stake in Todd Moscowitz’s Alamo Records. One well-placed source told us that, whatever Sony paid, it valued Alamo at a whopping $250 million. Other sources close to the deal suggested that this mooted $250 million figure was an exaggeration. All sources agreed that what  reported (“Sony paid comfortably north of $125 million”) was true. The question is: how far comfortably north? Further sources have since led us to believe that Sony Music paid somewhere between $125 million and $200 million for its majority stake in Alamo. We don’t know the precise size of majority stake Sony acquired. But, for example, if it bought a 75% chunk of Moscowitz’s company for $190 million, that would indeed give Alamo a ≈$250 million valuation. These guessing games don’t touch on perhaps the most interesting quirk of the deal, though: Alamo was originally launched as a JV with Universal Music Group. As ...

  For some time, influential voices in the industry have called for the unrecouped balances of heritage artists to be written off by record labels. This would see modern-day royalty earnings of these acts get paid into their pockets, rather than being swallowed by a record label with whom they may have ended dealings decades ago. That is especially true, in many cases, for heritage Black artists. Last summer, during industry-wide discussions surrounding Blackout Tuesday, veteran US artist manager and attorney, Ron Sweeney, called on the major record companies to implement a number of new policies in a strong op/ed. Sweeney wrote: “With respect to Black artists signed to you prior to 2000, that are no longer signed to your companies, zero out their unrecouped royalty balances and let their royalties flow to them so they can support themselves.” Many in the music industry never thought we’d see a day where a major record company openly embraced such a plan. Those people were wrong. I...