“Very comfortable and free of inhibitions…” French singer-songwriter Mina Agossi has a remarkable story to tell about how she has emerged from a tough time happier and stronger. She is enjoying the kind of creative freedom she has never had before, and also has her high notes back. She is looking forward to returning to London on 13 December for the UK launch of “Lonely Whales”, her first new album in six years, at the 606 Club. Feature/interview by Sebastian Scotney

The 606 Club has achieved quite a coup. On 13 December the club will host the UK album launch of “Lonely Whales” from French singer-songwriter Mina Agossi. She appeared earlier in the year at the 606, but – apart from that – she has essentially been absent from this country for several years.

People who attend the 606 launch will witness a person and a musician who has changed. A lot. People might remember the way she was in Candid albums from the late 2000’s such as “Simple Things?”. Her art then was all about asserting strength. There was power, defiance, rebellion in her whole way of being. At that time, as she remembers, she was on a treadmill. There was an expectation that she would release an album each year. Things have changed. There are bound to be surprises and delights.

There is, admittedly, one constant: namely the powerful presence of bassist Eric Jacot. He and Agossi have worked together for 19 years now; she calls him her “alter ego”.

But the change in the singer herself was palpable when I interviewed her last week. Perhaps there were already clues in the memorable, lyrical, engrossing title track of Ahmad Jamal’s valedictory album “Marseille” (some honour indeed to have been associated with that), but the new album “Lonely Whales” takes the move in that direction much further. The words of a reassuring, positive song “I’ll be there, no matter what” make the point well. They capture that sense of having emerged calmer and stronger. As Agossi sings in that song, “My yesterdays fade away.”

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That impression of an artist who has gone through a lot, and come through transformed, is clear when she talks. How is she these days? “Je suis hyper à l’aise et désinhibée” (“I’m very comfortable and free of inhibitions”), she is proud to declare. “And the upper register of my voice has got better and stronger.”

And yet the process of getting to this point has been neither easy nor simple. She admits that one musical project, a multi—country tour which she had built through her own immense hard work, and which was suddenly cancelled, left her feeling crushed. “I was burnt out,” she remembers. “I turned down absolutely every proposition that came my way.” She even looked into re-training as a psycho-analyst. “It would have been a complete change of life, something much calmer,” she remembers. “I am a singer. So, I thought, why don’t I just do it for my own pleasure?”

And then something happened. There was a chance meeting in an art gallery, and it changed everything.

Agossi got to know Marc Charriere and his electronica group AGE7 (a reference to Aristotle’s ‘Age of Reason’) in which he plays alongside guitarist Fabien Miedzianowski. Charriere has a huge sensitivity to sound and texture. At the start of his career he did projects with Peter Gabriel. But in the meantime, he has been back on track with the classic French high-flier career of a Grande Ecole alumnus in engineering. He has held a series of senior positions in the technology industry, working on sound immersion in particular. Even though he never stopped creating artistically, there has been a day-job, and a high-powered one.

Charriere took the initiative. He asked Agossi’s permission to take a couple of songs which the singer had written and recorded, and re-cast them with an ambient electronic backing, working with a guitarist. If she was understandably sceptical at the outset, doubts were quickly cast aside. The singer was blown away by the quality, the beauty and the inventiveness of what he had done. “Music is his thing, and he’s very good,” she underlines.

“Marc is not at all from the “milieu” of the music industry, and perhaps that was what made our collaboration work so well,” Agossi reflects. Charriere has a studio, and he made it available to Agossi to record, without time pressures of any kind.

Mina Agossi has never enjoyed this kind of creative freedom before. The album, she says, took two years to be ready to release, and is extremely “produced”.

Agossi wanted to do more. She has been determined to take this music away from the studio and the mixing desk, and onto the stage. The work of the last eighteen months has been to develop a live version. Agossi has huge experience as a live performer, “so I took the reins,” she says. And now she’s delighted to see that the band have come a long way since their first live electro jazz performance at the Ajaccio Jazz Festival: “since then, we’ve toured mainly in France”.

As Agossi assures me, “You’ll see, it’s going to be very emotional!”

LINKS: 606 Club bookings/details for 13 December
Mina Agossi website
AGE7 on Facebook