Piano Dazibao

Description

To avoid the "What's that?" on the cover of Piano Dazibao, François Tusques explains everything: a mural on which the Red Guards expressed their opinions during the Chinese proletarian cultural revolution. So much for the "Dazibao," very good; but what about the piano in all this? The piano, François Tusques was self-taught and his work was influenced by Jelly Roll Morton and Earl Hines before discovering Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, then... free jazz. In Paris in 1965, Tusques rubbed shoulders with Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Jean-François Jenny-Clark, Aldo Romano and Jacques Thollot. He also met Don Cherry and above all recorded, with other like-minded Frenchmen (Portal and Jeanneau alongside Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and Charles Saudrais), the first free jazz album in France, entitled... Free Jazz. In 1967, Tusques presented Le Nouveau Jazz again, this time with Barney Wilen (and Guérin, Jenny-Clark, Romano). Three years later, his thirst for freedom led him to isolation; between May and September 1970, the pianist recorded at home the first of two albums he would release on Futura Records: Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2. Under the influence of Mao and Lewis Carroll, this free spirit wanders and composes seven pieces that are less about freedom than libertarianism. In homage to a few friends (Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Clifford Thornton but also Colette Magny, Michel Le Bris or the Théâtre de Chêne Noir), the pianist played cascades of note clusters, free wanderings, surprise blues dances, growls, dissonances, a fatal requiem... A cherished freedom, songs of hope and protest, François Tusques offers the most uncompromising of independent records.