La Tradition

Description

Ces thirteen songs were recorded between 1992 and 1994, at the initiative of journalist, singer and musician Marc Robine, the mastermind behind the imposing work that was the Anthologie de la chanson française des trouvères aux grands auteurs du XiX ! This imposing work, which required twenty years of collecting, was awarded the Prix de l’Académie Charles-Cros the following year.
This work is not disconnected from Gabriel Yacoub’s oeuvre, far from it: some songs from this anthology even appear in the Malicorne repertoire (you will thus have recognized in Le Navire de Bayonne the music that had previously been used for La Complainte du coureur de bois on the 1978 album), even if they are performed by other artists. While he was simultaneously recording Quatre, his fourth solo album (organized into four sequences: hymns, charms, liturgy and speculations) released on Boucherie productions, Yacoub returns with La Tradition to this repertoire that once made Malicorne immensely successful and to the essence of his first solo record, Trad Arr, released, for its part, on Ballon noir in 1978.
As long as it is not illusory to see these thirteen titles gathered here as the continuation, the natural counterpart of this mythical 33 rpm record, even in these “Christian” songs which, through their universal heritage of beauty and spirituality, go far beyond the framework of religion. It was tempting to bring together these thirteen songs in the manner, not of a new Gabriel Yacoub album – which it is not – but as testimony to a part of his oeuvre that was unsuspected by some. Consider the artwork of this “new” album as a marked wink, an infinitely respectful tribute to the incredible folk singer that Gabriel Yacoub was, whose entire oeuvre, within Malicorne as afterward, in his infinite respect for tradition as in his boldness, is an incredible yet luxuriant path of beauty. Michel Kemper.