On Gabi Hartmann’s second album, “La femme aux yeux de sel (Le long voyage)” — in English, “The Girl with Salt Eyes (The Long Journey)” — the Parisian jazz vocalist tells the story of a woman named Salinda, who navigates life through three chapters: innocence, life’s disillusionments and, finally, serenity.
Speaking from France the day before flying to New York to prepare for her first US tour, Hartmann is asked if Salinda is a stand-in for herself.
“Yes. Definitely yes,” she says. “But I liked to kind of create a world that is inspired by my life, but it’s a world that I invented, and I don’t have to look at that world and say that this is me. I can create a distance with me and that.”
The album was re-released this week with eighth new songs, including “Fall Down,” featuring Swiss-French jazz trumpeter Erik Truffaz. “Fall Down” was supposed to be on the original version of the album, released last year, “but I felt that maybe it wasn’t the right moment to put it in,” Hartmann says. “We already had many songs, and I felt maybe that it was a bit different from the others and a bit more sad and down. … But then I rediscovered that song and I decided that it could really work and it could fit in that album, so I decided to put it in the extended version of the album.”
She says she’s also pleased with the addition of “chapters” to the story, which she initially cut because the album was running long. “But artistically, for me, it kind of made sense to have the chapters because it really helped us understand more like what I had in mind when I decided to record that album and why I had this idea of like creating a narrative where there’s like three moments in the album. … In the first chapter, it’s more like discovering herself and and being young and and discovering and traveling. And then the second part is more about disillusion and sadness, and the third part is about accepting all this life and all this stuff that she lived and she experienced. So I think, these chapters, I’m kind of excited to have them now.”
Hartmann was inspired to create a concept album after hearing records like Spanish singer Silvia Pérez Cruz’s “Toda la vida, un día” and Serge Gainsbourg’s “L’Homme à tête de chou,” as well as the musicals of Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda.
On “La femme aux yeux de sel (Le long voyage),” Hartmann sings in French and English, and she also sometimes sings in Portuguese. English was actualy her first language as a vocalist.
“I started to sing in English because I was learning jazz standards and blues and soul. And so the first language for me was more English because I felt I was more connected with that music. Singing in French came quite later after. I feel like now I’m just reconnecting all my influences and of course I think French is more the language I use to kind of write a narrative and really invent some a story. But I guess English is more for the singing and the vocal experience.”
Hartmann has recorded in New York and has performed at Birdland, Bar Lunatico and the since-closed The Owl in Brooklyn, but her March North American tour, which starts March 9 at Le Poisson Rouge, will be her first. She’ll rehearse with US-based musicians in advance of the stateside dates, which include stops in Boston, LA and San Francisco, and her French band will join her for the Canadian shows. She says she’ll be joined at LPR by her collaborator Jesse Harris, an American known for his work with Melody Gardot, Madeleine Peyroux and Norah Jones (he wrote her hit “Don’t Know Why”).
For the rest of 2026, she’ll play in Europe including at the Cully Jazz Festival in Switzerland in April and the Jazz in Arles festival in France in May. Then she’ll start writing her next album.
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