The final evening of the Sylis d’or 2025, held last night at the Fairmount Theatre, lived up to its promise of exhilarating ambience, festive rhythms and sunny music. The three bands in attendance – Raiz Viva, Kozé and Marzos & Mateo – delivered solid performances, but with finishing touches that made all the difference.
Marzos & Mateo’s fiery salsa took the gold Syli honors, while Raiz Viva’s exhilarating roots took second place for silver, with Kozé’s Reunion maloya taking bronze.
Kozé’s uneven performance explains this third-place finish, despite a vibrant incarnation on stage of the singer and dancer who leads the charge in a Maloya style originating on Reunion Island, colored by traditional songs accompanied by percussion. While the entrance to the stage was beautiful and the finale exciting, a central episode with approximate tonalities on the part of the backing singers probably harmed the group for good. A fine-tuning that remains to be done, but the collective still has some fine moments to offer future festival-goers who will be hearing them across Quebec and Canada.
For my money, it was Raiz Viva who offered the evening’s finest combination of surprise, energy and originality. An intense, sustained thirty-minute performance, based on a rhizomic cumbia from Colombia that dares to touch on some soil close to Brazil, but also to the country adopted by the members of the group, Quebec. There’s no electrification in this hyper-efficient proposition, just traditional flutes and a heap of percussion, but a stunning sense of rhythm and a full, voluptuous occupation of sonic space, backed by catchy melodies. Superb music from which emanates a convincing authenticity. I’d like to hear this band in full concert as soon as possible. And you too.
It was to be expected that the Marzos supergroup with soloist, guitarist and singer Mateo would hit hard. 14 people on stage, if I counted correctly, with a double ration of trumpets and trombones, a powerful baritone sax, a keyboard, backing singers, a singer (excellent) in addition to the star Mateo and a bunch of percussion, that’s enough to impress. Salsa that’s fairly predictable in its deployment, but certainly packs a punch. The atmosphere was explosive, as always in the finals (and semi-finals too) of the annual Sylis.
