简介：This seven-piece eclectic collection of musicians have teamed up to produce the intriguing sound of The Word combining many genres, such as Funk, Rap, Groove, Jazz, and Soul. Formed in 2011, The Word has been creating music and playing live around Shanghai including the last two year's JZ Shanghai Music Festival. They are now launching their second full-length CD titled "Calie" and will be celebrating this release November 14th at Cotton Club.   At Cotton Club this evening, The Word will be releasing their first full-length album. With 7 different members from 7 different countries (China, Finland, Portugal, Holland, Mauritius, America and France), the Word is one of those bands that would be hard to find anywhere other than Shanghai. Appropriately, the album includes vocals in 5 different languages.   “Dana sings in English, Amine raps in Dutch or English or Arabic, and I rap in French and Chinese” says vocalist Gauthier.“It’s a pretty multi-linguistic album for polyglots.”   The Word has been going for a year now, and was formed when Amine, Dana and Gauthier decided that they wanted to rap and sing over a live band rather than a DJ, taking inspiration from bands like Us3 and the Eric Truffaz Quartet.   Their line-up has changed three times over the year, typically for such a large ensemble in Shanghai, as musicians have come and gone. This has also been the reason that the album has taken such a long time to get together. The price, as always in Shanghai, for having such a diverse range of musicians available is the challenge of getting them all in the same place at the same time. What this means, however, is that the album charts a broad, year-long musical journey.   “It’s been a long process of digesting all the ideas and influences that we had as a group and putting them together, that’s obviously an achievement. I hope that people listen to it as a whole one year experience recorded by 15 to 20 Shanghai musicians. It’s a nice little baby, it took about the same amount of time to create!”   “It’s not like a rap album where all the songs are alike, all the songs have a different vibe, a bit of electro, a bit of trip-hop, a bit of reggae, a bit of ska influence. A lot of different things.”   As well as their new album, the Word have begun to take their sound in new directions, as they demonstrated at the JZ Festival last month, playing an acoustic set with no drums or keyboards.   The festival was the first time that the band had tried to pull of this stunt, and Gauthier admits that they were quite nervous, but the crowd grew exponentially and lapped it up, building up to a suitable volume for Gauthier to be able to crowdsurf. The Word plan to switch between their electronic and acoustic sets. “We have these two branches of the band, we love them both.”   There’s a lot to enjoy about The Word even if you’re not a polyglot. If you are, then good for you, you can laugh knowingly at the jokes in Dutch. Either way, do yourself a favour and head down to Cotton Club tonight to experience some infectiously jazzy old school hip hop.   -- Pete J (Shanghai 247)