Uman

You Are Here is the friendly, reassuring title of Uman's latest release. But just where you are is open to interpretation. The French brother and sister team of Didier and Danielle Jean uses an evocative blend of ambient electronics and sampled textures from around the world to create a music that suggests many places, but never actually settles on one.

The inspiration for the latest Uman CD, the group's fourth, was prosaic <>enough: "I was hiking in Big Sur National Park," says Didier,  "when I saw the red icon 'you are here' on a map."   But the concept immediately became something grander.  "The map is a geography of Life," adds Danielle.  "For each track we had a place in mind." With track titles like "N'doly or the Mother Land," "A Night in a Holy Place," and "Human Warmth in a Cold City," Uman were less interested in portraying specific places and more concerned with the journey of life. "Sometimes the listener is 'Where the Heart Beats,' explains Didier; "sometimes 'On the Way to Peace,' another time 'In a Cold City' or in the past ('Heliopolis'), or even 'On the Other Side.'"

The name Uman comes from a Native American word, umane, which means "Earth force."  (But go ahead and pronounce it Yoo-man; everyone else does.)  The duo has built up a worldwide following with their lush blend of electronics, samples of world musics, and Danielle's eerie, often wordless vocals.  Their initial success came among fans of New Age music, even though, as Didier points out, "when our first CD was released, in 1992, we didn't even know that New Age music existed!  We had composed this music without knowing that a family existed on the other side of the ocean."   The group began to attract a wider following with the release of two songs on a pair of American compilation CDs, and finally released its first full-length American CD, Purple Passage, on Six Degrees Records two years ago.

With You Are Here, a couple of Uman's other musical influences are more clearly felt; the grooves of modern dance music, hinted at in some of Uman's earlier songs, come to the fore in several tracks on the new CD ("Free Uman Walking", "The Way to Peace" ).  And the occasional touches of jazzy piano (played by Philippe Walter) and brass (courtesy of Claire Mickael and Georges Beckerich) echo one of Didier's earliest influences: "Jazz is my first love," he says; "Jazz is an attitude.  It is more than an influence. It is a way to see Life."

Uman actually presents several ways to see life - in addition to the music, the third member of the ensemble, the artist known as Zad, contributes a visual component, using pastels, gouache and acrylic paints to create the carefully coordinated packaging of the group's CDs.   Zad and Didier Jean use this combination of sonic and visual imagery to suggest and evoke; but they are accustomed to telling more traditional stories, too.  They have created more than twenty children's books, which have been widely translated in Europe.   And on You Are Here, the group also collaborates with the French novelist and poet Anne Mirman.

Both Mirman and Didier contribute poetry to the project, although for the most part, the poetry is separate from the music.  Danielle's vocals rarely use text; "For a Better World" uses one of Didier's poems, albeit in a somewhat unconventional way.  And as Danielle points out, "'Tous dans le meme bateau' can be considered as a real song."  The album's other twelve tracks use Danielle's voice as an instrument.  "A melody does not need words to tell a story," she says.  "Music puts you in a mood and you make the tale."

Music, art, and poetry are all part of the Uman package.  So are the sounds of the earth, and its human inhabitants.  Didier maintains a large library of recorded samples, of voices and natural sounds from around the world.  ("Ears on the look out," he says, "I hunt sounds.")  He also tapes the sounds of Asian and African percussion instruments and, in the case of "N'doly or the Mother Land," uses a traditional African nursery rhyme performed by Moussa Dialo as the basis for the whole song.

A new development in You Are Here is the addition of a sizable group of guest musicians, whose interpretations and improvisations add to the record's textural richness.  The ensemble includes percussionist Ben Chelfi, reed player Daniel Beaussier, flutist/saxophonist Finn Martin, and a host of others, playing instruments as diverse as the Western cello and the Australian didjeridoo.

Listening to You Are Here is like a musical travelogue of real and imaginary lands, represented by vocal and natural sounds both in their original form and in often highly altered states.   To anyone who's ever needed to check a map, there's nothing more welcome than the phrase "you are here."  After all, it answers the big question: where am I?  Uman's music is just as welcoming and friendly... but it's just as good at raising questions as it is at answering them.