Brass Trax
It sounds like a musical trainwreck in the making or the set-up for a joke about the excesses of the avant garde. A French chanteuse and a Kabyle musician meet an Afrocentric American free jazz band on a stage in Paris. Chaos ensues? Au contraire. If the 1971 album Comme à la radio is any indicator, the sound was absolutely sublime.
When she first took the stage with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1969, Brigitte Fontaine was already known as something of an outsider within the world of French pop. The singer, whose first album was called Brigitte Fontaine est folle! (”Brigitte Fontaine is Crazy”), was known as a chanson singer with an odd sense of harmony. A France Gall with an ear for the atonal. But when she began performing with Areski Belkacem, a musician from the North African part of the Parisian suburbs, she made a definitive break with the chanson tradition. Together, the duo mixed North African rhythms and harmonic ideas with a sung-spoken free verse that sounded like the trippy French version of beatnik rapping.
…[Fontaine] was known as a chanson singer with an odd sense of harmony. A France Gall with an ear for the atonal.
So, it didn’t require a huge conceptual leap for the duo to join forces with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a group with an abiding interest in non-Western rhythms and modalities. The Art Ensemble had grown out of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and, when it met Fontaine and Areski, the group was in the midst of a three-year residency in Paris that would change its artistic direction away from more conventional free jazz and toward a polyrhythmic world music fusion. At the time, the Art Ensemble had no drummer; each member of the band played percussion in addition to a handful of other instruments. Like Areski, the members of the Art Ensemble were multi-instrumentalists with little interest in any one style of playing. A suitable, if somewhat bizarre, match.
The Art Ensemble, Fontaine, and Areski played a series of concerts at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, where they rehearsed and perfected the material that would become Comme à la radio. Joined, for the recording sessions, by the Art Ensemble’s friend and fellow AACM member, trumpeter Leo Smith, the group had developed a strikingly tight sound for such a disparate array of musicians. The Art Ensemble, for its part, left most of the skronk to Smith, delivering a harmonically restrained, modal take on the musical material. “In,” rather than “out.” Fontaine’s voice, which was not the most subtle instrument, nonetheless had a relaxed elegance and an arresting suppleness that was most effective when she was breathing out the undertones of the notes she was singing.
The album’s production can only be called idiosyncratic. The bass and percussion lines are mixed on top of everything but Fontaine’s voice, which gives the album a propulsive sound that belies the complicated horn and saxophone melodies to be found lower in the mix. Fontaine’s voice was well recorded and produced with crystal clarity. The brass didn’t fare so well, sounding clipped and attenuated, more like droney, North African flutes than jazz trumpets, perfect for lending an atmospheric heft to Fontaine’s vocals.
The album begins with its title track, a haunting poem about boredom, alienation, and the radio, which, Fontaine tells us, is something between “the atrocity of silence and the atrocity of something else.” Heady stuff, but Malachi Favors’s bass makes it groove. It’s the rare track on the album in which the horns follow Fontaine’s voice around—up to the point, at any rate, when they break off into a cacophony of modal improvisations. A fitting start to the album.
After the polyrhymic workout of “Tanka II,” the album presents a track that’s all Areski. “Le Brouillard” is a haunting, droney confection, buttressed by a meandering modal harmony and Areski’s gruff voice, a blunt instrument that provides an intriguing contrast to Fontaine. It sets up the next track, “J’ai 26 ans,” one of the album’s best cuts. A duet, for the most part, between Fontaine and Favors, it’s a simple poem, set over a complicated bass groove. The self-description of a woman who has lived “26 years, 4 of them useful,” it’s a slice of the quotidian that wouldn’t sound out of place in a more conventional chanson, but Fontaine’s sung-spoken delivery conveys an anxiety that only she could muster.
The roots of chanson can also be found in “L’Été, l’été,” in which Areski sings scat couplets as if he were Jacques Brel, and a stringed instrument plays a little pop figure in the background. Fontaine circles around a harmony, and the rhythm instruments take a break. By contrast, it’s Fontaine who disappears almost completely for the duration of “Leo,” which gives the Art Ensemble a chance to stretch out without the hindrance of song structure. “Les Petites chevaux” is an a capella trifle, which multitracks Fontaine’s voice at its most fragile. Fontaine and Areski duet again with “Tanka I,” which, like its follow-up tune “Lettre à Monsieur le Chef de garde de la tour Carol” finds the entire group fully steeped in a droney groove that sounds something like an Indian raga.
But you could be excused for thinking that it was all set-up for “Le Goudron.” The easiest track to sing along with, “Le Goudron” sounds like North Africa’s answer to the Velvet Underground. Telling the story of a Dionysian evening to come, Fontaine’s sung-spoken vocals drone over a delirious groove. She sounds something like the French Nico, albeit with a nicer voice. Following up this psychedelic masterpiece, the album’s closing track “Le Noir c’est mieux choisi,” a meandering French pop song, sounds like a blast of normalcy.
The moment when chanson met North Africa and free jazz may not have made for an enduring musical tradition—it’s hard to imagine a different group of musicians putting these elements together correctly—but it did make for one of the finest pop music albums of the seventies.
