When Marion Rampal speaks about music, she doesn’t talk about entertainment or industry. She talks about companionship, about building character and about the power to accompany social change. And when she performs in Phnom Penh on October 15, she’ll be bringing with her not just songs, but the spirit of Abbey Lincoln, a jazz legend whose work she believes deserves to be heard anew.
“I became interested in working with someone else’s music as I’ve been so focused on my own songs, releasing two albums over the past four years,” Rampal explains. “I wanted to look back and pay a tribute to one of the artists that intrigued and influenced me the most.”
The project, titled “Song for Abbey”, is more than a conventional tribute. It’s what Rampal calls “a gesture of living memory”, an attempt to invoke and share the spirit of an artist who considered jazz “the most conducive form to what she called ‘character building’”.
Lincoln as Songwriter
Abbey Lincoln’s name often appears in discussions of jazz activism and the civil rights movement. She was involved in deeply political music, an outspoken voice in a turbulent time. But for Rampal, Lincoln’s legacy extends far beyond her activism.
“When you go beyond the fact that she was a militant, a black American woman involved in the civil rights movement – apart from that, she wrote beautiful songs,” Rampal says. “In her late career, between the age of, say, 50 and 80, she wrote an amazing collection.”
This is the heart of what Rampal wants to illuminate.
“We always talk about jazz singers, especially female jazz singers, forgetting a little that they are also sometimes authors, poets and composers. I wanted to talk about this woman. I’ve never met her. She comes from another background. She comes from another country. But she truly redefined what it means to sing jazz and to write songs for jazz.”
Lincoln revealed herself late as a songwriter, releasing a series of personal albums in the late 1990s that constitute a major songbook, yet one that has been rarely covered. Songs like Caged Bird, Learning How to Listen, and The Music is the Magic form what Rampal calls “marvels” that she proposes to celebrate alongside her musicians – Matthis Pascaud on guitar, Arthur Alard on drums, Bruno Ruder on piano and Laurent Vernerey on bass.
The concert will blend some of Lincoln’s flagship and more intimate songs with adaptations and compositions, as well as what Rampal describes as “satellite pieces” illuminating Lincoln’s musical roots and loves, such as Dylan and Oscar Brown Jr.
The Editorial Move
There’s an urgency to Rampal’s project that goes beyond artistic tribute. Lincoln had no children, and as Rampal points out, “When you’re a jazz singer and when you’re not into industry networking, your legacy tends to be very, very fragile.”
“She is not, for example, studied in the jazz universities of today,” Rampal notes. “When I was in jazz school, I wish someone would have said, ‘today we have six months and we’re gonna do the whole semester on Abbey Lincoln songs’. That would have been a blast. So I did my own. It was a kind of editorial move, I think,” she says, smiling.
This concern for preserving and transmitting the work of older women artists runs deep in Rampal’s artistic philosophy.
“I think we don’t talk enough about this,” she says. “It’s good to have women today of a certain age, a certain experience, who are giving their own version, their own story about the world around them; the way they see the world, and the way they experienced it. We lack this,” she continues.
“I think Abbey was always a free woman, a free mind. She avoided getting involved in the music industry and the Hollywood swamp. She never got interested in making money and being famous. She was talented, but she was a fierce character. And I think we need more examples like this today, for young people to get inspired by different figures, different heroes”.
A Life Soaked in Song
To understand Rampal’s approach to music – her refusal to be confined to “watertight boxes” – you have to go back to Marseille, where she was born in 1980 into a family that was “soaked” in music from the beginning.
Her grandfather was a young jazz musician after the Second World War, touring the casinos of the Côte d’Azur, playing with the likes of Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong.
In her grandparents’ house, jazz filled the air. Her grandfather played piano, teaching her standards and songs when she was very young. Her mother, too, sang beautifully, creating lullabies that sounded “like Michel Legrand pieces, like Demoiselles de Rochefort – very jazz, very sophisticated melodies. So my ear, I think, was into music and melodies from birth”.
She played flute, sang in her high school choir, became a soloist. At 14, she fell into rock – both the ’90s music of her time (Sonic Youth, R.E.M.) and the ’70s legends she discovered simultaneously, like Patti Smith, Jim Morrison and The Doors.
“I wanted to write songs and be on stage,” she says. “So I always oscillated between jazz and more singer-songwriter, rock and folk music.”
Jim Morrison, in particular, became a guiding figure during her formative years. She has even set his poems to music, “because he had a powerful influence on my writing, my singing, and on what it means to be on stage – the electricity of it”.
The Singer as Troubadour
Throughout her career, Rampal has moved fluidly between traditions and languages – French, English, German. She’s drawn to Berlin cabaret songs, which she sees as crucial to understanding jazz and variety music.
“We owe so much to these exiled German composers… Kurt Weill, Spoliansky, people like this,” she explains.
The cabaret tradition resonates with her not just musically but politically.
“In the ’80s, there was a big comeback to the aesthetics of Berlin cabaret – very political, acid, social critic. The queer culture, the lesbian, gay, pride culture comes from the Germany of the Weimar Republic. It was a very intense and very expressive era for the arts before the Nazis came.”
These contexts – periods of intense cultural mixing, often born from struggle – are where Rampal finds her richest material.
“By singing music that comes from that background, that emerged through a cultural shock, or a cultural blend, beautiful or tragic… blues, jazz… I think you revive the quality of this human experience. That’s what I’m looking for.”
When asked if she sees herself as an activist, Rampal is careful in her response.
“I think the message is towards more freedom, of course, and also to bring out the qualities of what it is to meet another person’s culture, what it is to build a new tradition by mixing genres, languages and styles of music. That’s what I try to experiment with. But I see myself more a troubadour today, a songwriter, really.”
The troubadour – the wandering medieval poet-musicians of southern France, where she’s from.
“That’s my south of France origin, the troubadours. So I’m interested in the work of blues men, but also of Dylan and Smith, people who write songs and who bring out melodies that make the audience refer to their experience of life in a different way.”
This brings her to a broader vision of music’s purpose.
“There is a social quality to music. There is a political quality to music. I tend to see music like this and not only as an entertainment or an industry or something just to have fun with.”
Especially now, she notes, in a time when “we are facing identity struggles and fascism is coming back – I mean, in the ideas, in the press, in what you hear, what you see. So I think music in its small way – it may not be as direct as what Greta Thunberg is doing – but singing, picking up the right songs, choosing thoroughly what you’re going to talk about – that’s important for me. That’s why now music for me is never merely an entertainment. It’s one of the highest experiences, art, for the people. So I try to play my part in that.”
Recognition and Reward
In 2022, Rampal won the Victoire du Jazz (Jazz Victory) award in the Vocal Artist category for her album Tissé, a collection of personal songs in French and English. She was also nominated for a Grammy Award for her vocal contributions to I Hear the Sound by legendary saxophonist Archie Shepp, with whom she has collaborated for nearly 15 years. Shepp, now 88, knew Abbey Lincoln personally.
“He’s a jazz legend, for sure,” Rampal says. “He is one of the masters of saxophone and free jazz. I feel very lucky to be so close to such an artist, such a person. He’s a source of influence, inspiration and spirit. A beautiful soul.”
But for all the accolades, what resonates most deeply with Rampal are the moments when her songs serve a purpose beyond performance. When she won the award at just over 40, she felt “very serene. I told myself, ‘keep on doing what you do’. Because it gets heard. It gets appreciated. It’s wonderful to have a Victory, but it’s also beautiful when someone writes to you on the internet or on your Instagram and says, ‘we played your songs for my grandmother’s funeral’.“
She laughs, “Yes, I get played at a lot of funerals. This is just how it is. But I feel good knowing, ‘this is what I do. This is good. This song served something.’“
Looking East
This will be Rampal’s first visit to Cambodia and only her second trip to Asia.
“I’m very curious about the feel that I’m going to get from a Cambodian audience. I hope the people will enjoy our show and our music,” she says.
She’s already been listening to Cambodian songs, discovering the golden age artists and bands from later periods like Dengue Fever. Through the French Institute of Cambodia’s (IFC) CHAKTO programme – one of the leading cultural and creative industry initiatives in the Kingdom – she hopes to meet young Cambodian artists to “create links and return soon”.
When asked what people should be listening to, she immediately mentions Cécile McLorin Salvant, a baroque opera soprano and Grammy-winning jazz singer-songwriter who is part French, Haitian and American.
“The way she puts together the lyrics and melodies – her work is amazing. She blends many things: baroque music, jazz, standards, musicals,” Rampal says. “She’s very inspiring and original. You wouldn’t hear her kind of music from anyone else. It’s something really particular.”
The same could be said of Rampal herself. Described once as “too madly in love with music to put it away in watertight boxes”, she embodies a resistance to categorisation that feels increasingly vital.
“If people can’t identify you, they can’t stick a little label on you, like, ‘oh, she’s jazz, oh, she’s funk rock, oh, she’s the next whatever or whoever…’ They can’t do that when you don’t have boundaries.”
For Rampal, not being boxed is the point.
Song for Abbey
As she prepares to bring Abbey Lincoln’s music to Phnom Penh, Rampal is clear about what she hopes to achieve.
“It’s not just, ‘oh, let’s cover this song from Abbey Lincoln’. Some people did that. There are one or two good songs we’re going to cover, but I wanted to go beyond that.”
What she’s offering instead is an education, a transmission, a way of keeping alive what Lincoln herself believed about jazz – that it builds character and encourages one to think, be unique, honest and cultured.
“I think her songs have a more international, universal quality, so I sing in English for this repertoire.” Rampal says. “And I’m really excited to bring her music to other cultures.”
Her visit will be brief – just three or four days before heading to South Korea – but Rampal is already thinking about the future.
“The idea is to come back next year, tour more of Southeast Asia and discover more about the region,” she says.
For now, though, there’s this – a francophone singer channelling the spirit of a great American jazz artist, bringing songs of freedom and character-building to an audience that may never have heard them before.
Rampal will perform at Raffles Hotel Le Royal on Wednesday, October 15 at 8pm in a special concert organised by the French Institute, co-produced by Steven Gargadennec and sponsored by Raffles, The Piano Shop Cambodia and The Pacific Cigar. The event is part of La Nuit des Idées 2025, presented by IFC under the theme “Power to Act”” Tickets can be booked online at the IFC website at https://www.ifcambodge.com/community/event-rsvp/?event_id=750.
“I’m very, very excited to come to Cambodia,” Rampal says. “And so happy that they welcome our music. And so I hope to come back, because it’s going to be too short a trip this time, just a hello.”
But perhaps, in the tradition of the troubadours she claims as ancestors, a hello is where the best stories begin.
