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Trans Kabar is a project created by Stéphane Hoareau, exploring an electrified interpretation of the mystical rites of Réunion Island to shape a music he calls “trans maloya.” After more than 300 concerts, the band has taken on new momentum, rekindling the embers of electrified Réunionese kabars by welcoming David Doris on vocals and kayamb — a roots voice straight from the island’s kabars — Clémence Gaudin on double bass, Ianik Tallet on drums, with Stéphane Hoareau continuing as musical director and guitarist.

Stéphane Hoareau draws inspiration from the Servis Kabaré, a festive ceremony rooted in the rituals of enslaved people, created as a way to commune with ancestors through music, song, and dance. Often rejected, forbidden, nearly forgotten, this rite survived in secrecy. Trans Kabar brings it back into the present.

Here, musicians and audience form an inseparable whole; the musician becomes a conduit to the collective, music a pretext for communion. Trans Kabar builds its work on traditional maloya songs and the melodies of Servis Kabaré. Spontaneous and intensely creative, the four artists leave wide space for improvisation. Rock-infused maloya rhythms are sculpted and reshaped, plunging into the laments of an insular blues.

When Trans Kabar recorded Maligasé, its first album, the band had existed for only four months. First steps, primal cry — what a beautiful newborn. A hybrid, mixed music born in Paris from the encounter between traditional Réunionese maloya and the instruments of rock and jazz. A concept, a fusion alchemy between naturally curious musicians, hungry for adventure and free to imagine new ways of approaching traditional music, orchestrated by Stéphane Hoareau. Maligasé was an album of triple-meter trance and electric dance, one (bare) foot on the soil of Réunion and the other pressing down on an effects pedal.

The second album, Mazine la mor, was recorded only a few months after the release of the first, while the band was performing relentlessly. It reflects the growth of a group forged and fulfilled on stage — or never far from it.

Biting electric guitars drawn from noise rock and infused with West African motifs; double bass and drums shaped by free jazz until they merge into a single instrument; musicians singing in chorus; the whole forming a vegetal wall of sound where roots, branches, flowers, thorns, and fruit proliferate and intertwine. It is dense, powerful, shamanic, volcanic. Precise as math rock, sentimental as the echo of a guitar, rebellious as the so-called “weed” of maloya — but who decided it was a weed?

This music is at once maloya, rock, and free jazz — and more than the sum of the three.

It is the expression of a band caught in the act of musical marronnage, intoxicated with freedom.

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