MAYA KAMATY

The time seems distant when the “môme Pounia” (named after the founder of the famous Réunion collective Ziskakan), then a student in Montpellier, emerged and made her first steps on stage as a backing vocalist.

Since then, Maya has returned to her island and has embraced the Creole language along with maloya. Her parents and her “dalons” (friends in French) – including the stellar wanderer Alain Peters – fought from as early as 1979 to ensure that this music did not die. With a kayamb in hand, Maya seizes her history and makes it her guiding thread. She chooses her second name “Kamaty” (that of a standing woman, marginal and intense, inhabitant of the village of Grand Bois, which her father spoke a lot about), to carve out her path.

With this new EP, she takes a different path, does not smooth the edges, composes syncopated music, sings lyrics of deep rage that she expels in a breath akin to the urgency of the street. “Sovaz” evokes the raw, unpolished, ill-mannered, even insolent side, an attitude that borrows from the codes of street gangs, bad boys, rebellious girls. Sovaz is the expression of a woman who embraces herself as such.