«I found myself an old carriage, forgotten on a siding. I eventually spent my days there, sitting on the step from sunup to sundown for two months. Many songs got written there, as they mostly just came to me. I watched the evening sun, heard automobiles on the traffic bridge above the railroad, I saw planes fly their way to the airport as dogs and clouds and ideas and time would be passing by. One evening as I left, I happened to wonder what these songs would sound like outside of their scenery. »

« Well, we may never know about that. I went to see my agent and told him that if we were to record this Napoleon Washington’s debut album, We’d for sure have to record the music and the stories, but also the air and the time. That we weren’t to record no nothing in Clarksdale, Mississippi, ‘cause I ain’t from Clarksdale, Mississippi in the first place. That I ain’t learned this job in the 20s of the late 20th century, and that I couldn’t see how Blues, which stands for me as one of the most honest and direct types of music, could cope with anything but its own sincerity. And let’s not make it a big deal cause it ain’t no star natal genius arty vision of anything. It’s just music. My music. »

« Boom. Now did anybody call for paramedics or ask if I had hopelessly lost my mind this time? Nope. We went through some location trial sessions. We realized that it sounded like a record you’d play at the fifteenth floor of a building downtown, with one window slightly open: you don’t pay attention to it, but it’s set in a background.

You know, I think recording music can be very different from a given situation to another. Say for instance you tape a live show: you capture a moment, you sort of «immortalize» one tiny bit of time, but the conditions you have to work with are those of a live gig. Now take a studio album: you get far more control on the performance, you get all the experimentation, but these notions of «time» and «location» often end up sterilized. On that particular project, we thought it would be great to have both the live and the lab, the crude gesture and the fine arts refinement.

So we looked for the best spot on that freight trains lot. We ended up under the roadbridge, with a good enough isolation from the traffic noises, with nice acoustics between the unparallel arch and ground. That’s it! And if the album’s title is «Hotel Bravo», it’s got to do with serving for a little while as a shelter for a music which, in eighty years of history, has known more of cold grounds than palace suites. And which is only passing there.

Oh, I almost forgot: you see, in aviation radio traffic, it is pretty vital that conversations can’t be misunderstood. One particular rule then requires letters to be announced through a code of words, simple and clear enough in any language. For example, «Hotel» stands for H and «Bravo» for B. Now guess what? Every plane registered in Switzerland is given a code of which the first two letters are H and B, namely Hotel Bravo. And being «registered» is the minimum requirement to be allowed to move anywhere. Ain’t it?»