Breton chant makes friends with rap

Denez Prigent, a leading light in Breton song, has once again pushed back the musical boundaries. His latest adventure includes an exciting collaboration with New York rapper Masta Ace. 

Denez Prigent's latest album Ul Liorzh Vurzhudus / An Enchanting Garden DR

Singer-songwriter Prigent is very well known in France for singing traditional Breton a capella ballads known as Gwerz and call and response Kan Ha Diskan. While he continues to defend the Breton language through his music, he's always been open to different musical genres. "I’d tried jazz, classical, new electronic music. I’d met world music singers and musicians, but I’d never experimented with hip hop," he told RFI.

As he prepared to release his 100% accoustic album Ul Liorzh Vurzhudus (An Enchanting Garden) he thought it was about time he "tried his hand at hip hop".

The result is a four-track EP Denez Remix which accompanies the album. Beatmaker James Digger, a fellow Breton, did the savvy mixing and introduced Prigent to Masta Ace. The New Yorker raps on the song Ar Biniou Skornet (The Frosty Bagpipe). The result is disarmingly harmonious:  "a sort of melding of a rap voice and the incantation of my own," says Prigent. "There's something sacred in it."

When Digger first approached Masta Ace and sent him a sample of Prigent's work, the rap star, admired by Eminem, didn't understand a word. 

"A friend of mine who speaks French said he didn't understand a word either," he told us on the line from New York. 

But that didn't stop him being moved.

"I was inspired by his voice, his delivery. Even though I didn't understand the language there was just a certain amount of emotion and feeling. I just basically took the energy from what I heard in his voice and those lyrics came to me." 

Prigent was pleased but not altogether surprised that Masta Ace should have been able to relate to his music, especially Kan Ha Diskan with its trance-like repetitive rhythms. 

"He was hearing a flow he'd never heard before. Kan Ha Diskan is a form of old rap, unconscious rhymes that we find in different forms in different musical styles."

Part of the deal was that Prigent should contribute to Masta Ace's upcoming concept album The Falling Season. He features on The Story of Me. "It's a very important song on the album... a great moment on the record," says the New Yorker.

So Prigent's voice, and the Breton language, will reach new ears over the Atlantic.

Who knows what hip hop fans will make of it, but it can't do any harm.

When Prigent was growing up, 95% of the population in Brittany spoke Breton, now it's closer to 5%. 

"When I was young, I believed that Breton could take off again. Now I can see this language is dying. And a part of me is dying along with it," Prigent says with the melancholy so characteristic of Breton song and the winds of his native Roscoff.