Drawing on stories of migration from the heart of Brittany to the USA, Rennes-based bombard-player Stéphane Hardy has been developing this complex creation since 2015, bringing together history, traditional music, jazz and contemporary and urban music. Based on the character of New Yorker Dave Malis and Breton immigrants working at the Michelin plant in Milltown, New Jersey, the Project is a quintet performance for fifty spectators wearing earphones in unique “private headphone sessions”. This intense moment of sensory and audio proximity goes beyond the realms of a traditional concert and breaks down territorial notions.

Much research has been done into the generation that left central Brittany for the United States in the early 20^th century. Focusing on the period from 1907 to 1950 and the Michelin plant in Milltown, New Jersey, Stéphane Hardy invented the story of Dave Malis, a New York sonneur, born to an American father and Breton mother who emigrated in 1919.

The Dave Malis Project blends music, images and storytelling, drawing on background work to collect historical information from sound and picture archives. Since 2015, it has evolved through various stages of creation, from a concert to these “private headphone sessions”, which will be presented to fifty spectators at Les Tombées de la Nuit. Each spectator will be given headphones and can sit wherever they want in the concert venue, right beside the quintet. The music plays out in a space of intense intimacy and unique sensorial proximity.

The Dave Malis Project quintet falls somewhere between traditional music, jazz, urban music and contemporary music, bringing together Kreizh Breizh and the Big Apple in a dreamlike concrete jungle. It paints a new audio landscape, modifying the approach to land and territories by proposing a new way of mapping cultures, with a contemporary perspective firmly established in the past and the notion of “unrooted” cultures.