In the first episode of the DELTA KREOL series, Ipomen Leauva tells us about the cultural effervescence that Guadeloupe experienced in the 60s and 70s and that shaped the foundations of today's Caribbean music. He tells us about these influences, his experience and the importance of creolitude in the appropriation of African, South American and surrounding island influences to make an identity of its own in Guadeloupe.

🌴DELTA KREOL, what is this podcast series?

Having lived in Guadeloupe for several years, I was invited to participate as a musician in the various events that mark the cultural calendar of the island community.
This experience was a real initiation for me because I had the opportunity to immerse myself in a culture other than my own, to feel the community aspect, as well as the universal scope that emerges from it.

This culture is a living memory, like most oral cultures, and music plays an essential role. It bears witness to the community's gatherings to celebrate life and the dead, to accompany work in the fields and the harvest, and to settle conflicts within the community.
The Creole language was born in the plantations in the face of the colonists' prohibition at the same time as the Gwo ka: a musical genre from Guadeloupe mainly played with drums called
"ka".
It is a music that expresses freedom, bears witness to the suffering experienced, and sings of strength and resilience in the face of oppression.
It has allowed individuals from different ethnicities to unify, communicate and find a common life force during slavery.
In Guadeloupe, music is synonymous with collective memory, history and identity: a dynamic identity that is permeable to its surroundings, to nature and to other cultures. It is a true medium to preserve and share its humanity.
In history, the West Indies remain a precursor of crossbreeding on a global scale, where Amerindian, European, Asian and African, Eastern and Western cultures have rubbed shoulders and given birth to new cultures.

Through this project, I invite the listener to experience a journey through this little-known culture of our country where the roots coexist with the present.

Here I wished to draw the eye on this region of the globe and this under represented French department in a general way. Starting from the oral essence of this culture, the podcast is in my opinion, the ideal medium to transmit it.
More than an initiatory journey within this musical culture, through this podcast, I bring to light what this culture brings to the inhabitants of the island but also what it can bring to whoever would tend the ear and the spirit to this one.
True vector of identity, of social link, this music gives an echo to many subjects, so much historical, sociological or spiritual. More broadly, this work of sound creation wishes to be in line with the work of Charles Duvelle (label of radio France OCORA) and Alan Lomax (ethnomusicologist)

Ipomen Leauva is our ambassador for the entire DELTA KREOL series.
This Guadeloupean artist was, among other things, the singer of the Vikings of Guadeloupe, an emblematic music group of this Caribbean island in the 60s and 70s, one of whose members later founded Kassav', a mythical group with great international success.
With an experience of 50 years of career, the singer Ipomen Leauva is part of the first Guadeloupean artists who made known the Caribbean music internationally, especially in Europe, Africa and the Americas. He had the opportunity to play with Manu Dibango and Miles Davis who, as his arranger Marcus Miller admits, was inspired by this music to compose one of his last albums.
This personality very involved in the social life of Guadeloupe, invited me on his island to meet the actors and holders of the musical tradition of his island during a 10-day stay in 2019, at the time of Carnival.

The Guadeloupean musical tradition is popular, alive and still very present in the contemporary life of the island. It conveys the history of a collective, its memory and its language. It is transmitted by the word and the sound which impregnate both the body and the spirit.

The construction of the series is based on 3 main themes which are each the subject of a 15mn episode.
Field recordings set the scene. Quotes or short testimonies of speakers introduce each episode in order to propose a reading angle. The thread of each episode unfolds like a road trip on the island where, at each stage, the word is given to the actors of this culture, of different generations, whether they are a drum master, an instrument maker or a poet.

Have a good trip!