MOBILISATION GENERALE (French protest and spirit jazz 1970-1976) vinyl)

Description

Nothing will save us. From the rubble of the old world, the children of Marx and Coca Cola emerge to tear the blue and white from the tricolor flag. The air is red, and music will no longer soften morals. The worksite can begin. If the Stones, the Who, the Kinks or MC5 compose the soundtrack of the revolution with Molotov singles, it was Black Americans who blew the dams apart during the sixties. Against daddy’s jazz and Western tradition, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler or Archie Shepp then free the note, blow up formats, launch into furious improvisations that redraw a territory without borders, as spiritual as it is political. With free jazz, the saxophone too becomes a machine for destroying the established order. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, which landed in Paris in 1969 at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, lights a new fuse. The quintet adds to the traditional lineup a multiplicity of “small instruments” found here and there (from the bicycle bell to wind chimes, via the steel drum, the djimbe or the vibraphone: nothing escapes them), which they use according to their inspiration. On stage the group stands out by wearing boubous and war paint in order to celebrate the powers of a free and hypnotic music, in direct connection with its African roots. The encounter with the Saravah label (founded in 1965 by Pierre Barouh), then at the forefront of a world music that did not yet have a name, was obvious. The album Comme à la radio by Brigitte Fontaine, recorded in 1970 following a series of concerts given at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, seals the union of this heir to a poetic and committed French chanson (Magny, Ferré, Barbara) with the voodoo jazz of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Arab tradition carried on by her companion Areski Belkacem. A UFO has just landed on the turntables of French teenagers who are discovering underground culture via Actuel, Libération, Charlie Hebdo, Rock'n Folk and a free press in full boil. A youth that is involved in every struggle: alongside the peasants on the Larzac plateau, the workers of the Lip factory, against nuclear power at Creys-Malville, the Vietnam War, the death penalty, the discrimination suffered by women, homosexuals and immigrants. Making music when you are 20 in the early 70s means making politics. You don’t pick up a microphone to become a rock star but to push your ideas forward. While the price of oil is soaring and Pompidou is concreting over everything by developing large housing estates and “adapting the city to the automobile,” people hit the road to take refuge in the countryside. From communities formed in every corner of the hexagon come groups (or rather collectives) with variable geometry that freely mix music, theatrical happenings and agit prop under a healthy dose of acid. Total chaos is often the order of the day (prog rock is the cliché of the era), but those who take the path drawn by spiritual jazz are floating toward other skies. The vehemence (even the grandiloquence) of the words is then carried and transcended by the finesse and inspiration of the playing. Claude François’s France had never heard anything like it. At once spatial, pastoral and tribal, the tracks gathered here make the perfect link between a certain psychedelic legacy, Sun Ra’s space jazz and the Afro Beat then taking shape in Lagos with Fela; they are as much incantations (the use of spoken word is recurring), war cries, poems as leaflets. 1978. Giscard is at the helm. Punk and disco are beheading the last hippies. If the blood is still boiling, it is already too late. The war is over, it has been lost without anyone noticing, and however much one may still fight against windmills, sometimes make powder and lead speak in hopeless struggles (from dream to nightmare there is only one step), one knows that the enchanted parenthesis has just closed, that the happy tomorrows are now behind us and that we will leave only a few records to our children. The specter of a prophetic single can then resurface from the speakers. Brigitte Fontaine asks Areski: “Hey, but I’m thinking of something, we’re not going to die in a minute?”