Akram Sedkaoui

Of Tunisian origin, Akram was born in Toulon. As far back as he can remember, music has always been part of his life, from the Arabic themes his mother hummed to French variety shows on television. In his teens, he experienced his first major musical shocks when he discovered Stevie Wonder and the album Talking Book, then Bob Marley, while also diving into landmark pop artists across generations such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Supertramp, John Paul Young and Michael Jackson. In Toulon, he was also captivated by Carmen at the opera, even as he strummed his first guitar, which had only two strings.

In the year he took his baccalaureate, he began to sing and, encouraged by his brother Atef, started working with other musicians. It proved a revelation: he was made for the stage, where he took his first steps while refining his taste through artists as varied as Dead Can Dance, Peter Gabriel, Mozart, DEEJAY FAMILY, Donny Hathaway and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

From the early 1990s onward, his path was marked by formative encounters. He took part in a jam with the American band Toto in a club in Nice, met drummer Félix Sabal-Lecco and vowed to work together someday, and shared a microphone with Terence Trent D’Arby one evening during the San Remo festival. In 1996, he met jazz musicians in a club in Old Nice and eventually sang with them for more than two years, an experience that taught him musical discipline, respect for structures, and opened the door to improvisation—his own “license to sing.”