An Interview with Ibeyi
Lisa Diaz was alone when she answered my Skype call; her sister Naomi was in traffic and would join shortly. The twins sing together as the duo Ibeyi, and, in 2014, they released their self-titled début album. As Lisa, the pianist and lead singer, moved about her apartment in Paris, a white cabinet with white ceramic mugs, one with a heart drawn on, came into sight. She wore a black top. She has a soft face and wears her hair in a ‘fro.
An Interview with Ibeyi
Lisa Diaz was alone when she answered my Skype call; her sister Naomi was in traffic and would join shortly. The twins sing together as the duo Ibeyi, and, in 2014, they released their self-titled début album. As Lisa, the pianist and lead singer, moved about her apartment in Paris, a white cabinet with white ceramic mugs, one with a heart drawn on, came into sight. She wore a black top. She has a soft face and wears her hair in a ‘fro.
The twins, who are twenty years old, were born in Cuba, and, at two, they moved to Paris to live with their mother, Maya Dagnino, a French-Venezuelan singer. You can hear the influences of both countries, and more, in their music. “We listen to a lot of English and American music and plus our record label is English. It is what feels natural to me when I write songs,” Lisa told me. But their music is more than the sum of disparate cultures, as a quick listen might suggest. “Our lyrics are also in Yoruba,” she said. In a world of influences, Ibeyi, now working on a new album, is both at home in their sound and searching.
For new listeners, the song “Ghosts” is an apt starting point. Like most of their songs, what drives “Ghosts” are the drums and the piano’s melody, with Lisa’s voice slipping into the spaces in between. The song opens with the lines, “Welcome to my earth / It’s a crying shame / We have built a foolish world / busy fighting, cruelly lying, and denying.” The song takes a dive inward as Lisa sings, “Make love to me / my ghosts are not gone.” Lisa, who, of the two, writes more of the song lyrics, explained the wistful song as an opening to their spiritual lives. “It is a song to Oya, the goddess of death,” she said. “I am not scared about death and feel comfortable about my ghosts.”
The twins’ father was also a musician. The legendary Cuban percussionist Miguel “Angá” Diaz was passionate about a great array of music; he played with the Buena Vista Social Club, the Afro-Cuban band Irakere, American jazz greats Steve Coleman and Roy Hargrove, and he also loved hip-hop. Lisa and Naomi visited their father in Cuba every year on holidays until Diaz passed away in 2006 from a heart attack, when the twins were just eleven. The day after her father’s death, Naomi sat on her father’s cajon drum and began to play. Lisa had already learned to play the piano and, encouraged by her mother, had begun to write and sing songs. Lisa and Naomi had an older sister, Yanira, who died in 2013 from a stroke. “Above anything else, Ibeyi is about everyday hope. That even if you’ve lost someone that you love, in this case two people, you can still love,” Lisa said.“It’s also about groove,” Naomi said. She’s the drummer and who’d joined the conversation, in from traffic. She was wearing a black scarf, which she took off. She has sharper features than her sister and long, wavy hair.
In Cuba’s Yoruba religion, Ibeyi means twins. Speaking with Naomi and Lisa, you often hear one explain the other with a confidence level that borders on satire.
“Our music is just ourselves and we just sort of mess around with stuff until we get something we like,” Lisa said.
“Yes, spontaneous,” Naomi said.
Naomi said: “We are a mix of so many things, of French, of Cuban, of African.”
Lisa: “Our music is just a reflection of who we are.”
“Yanira” is one of the album’s most touching songs. It was written in honor of the third Diaz sister. “Why did fate make you go? / Will we meet in heaven, meet in heaven?” the song, at first, asks. It’s a mid-tempo and sparse song that makes you more attentive to the lyrics. Nearing the end of the song, the question turns into a declaration: “We will meet in heaven, meet in heaven,” Lisa and Naomi sing together. This song, too, has a lost-but-now-am-found quality that seems to, among all the cultures and tragedies, really reveal who the Diaz sisters are.
“The album is just ourselves,” Lisa said.
Despite their relative musical inexperience, Lisa and Naomi are confident about the direction in wich they have taken their careers. To the twins, they are first and foremost artists who express what comes naturally to them. They seem to have pushed aside exploiting any sort of exotic idea that one may have of France or of Cuba. Not once did they bring up a hot topic like the Cuban revolution today and how it relates to their music. Time will tell if their next album will be as good as the last one. However, the one thing that is for certain is that the disc, especially the songs’ lyrics, will mean something profound to both twins. It will likely be an accurate reflection of whom they understand themselves to be and of their personal lives.
By Emmanuel Adolf Alzuphar
Emmanuel Adolf Alzuphar is a free lance music critic