Roland Brival - Creole Gypsy

Soundway presents a forgotten piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Caribbean music - a seminal work of Pan-Caribbean Spiritual Jazz. Newly remastered, pressed by Disques Garcia in Marciac, France, and presented in a luxury flipback sleeve. Recorded in Martinique in 1980, Roland Brival’s visionary fusion of spiritual Caribbean jazz, poetry and Creole consciousness flows through Rhodes, saxophone and traditional percussion.

Recorded with a group of Martinique’s top musicians, and combining the bèlè and carnival percussion traditions of the island with free flowing saxophone, rhodes flourishes and languorous bass, the album was rejected by Roland’s label of the time, and was ultimately self-released in miniscule quantities to a small local audience. Themes of créole identity and colonial injustice combined with universal ideas of love and longing sung in Créole, English and French sound like an Antillean answer to Gary Bartz and Jon Lucien, underpinned with the insistent rhythms of the ti bois percussion. Long unheralded in the English-speaking world, Créole Gypsy is a key piece of the jigsaw of Caribbean music.