Nous Avons Tant Parlé
In 1969, a French chanteuse, an Algerian multi-instrumentalist, and a Chicago jazz quartet undertook an experimental, exploratory, revolutionary musical voyage; a redrawing of musical parameters that, to this day, stands as a glittering beacon, glowing in the dark abyss of 'out' music.
Brigitte Fontaine was a stage actress turned popular vocalist, a charismatic, rebellious princess of the Parisian art-world seeking to fuse radical theatrical performance with music. In Areski Belkacem, a French-born Algerian of Kabyl origin, Fontaine had found a kindred spirit; a collaborateur to help push her further and further into idiosyncrasy and iconoclasm. Comme à la Radio was the first album Fontaine and Belkacem made together. It was such a riotous artistic success they eventually worked on 11 more.
Back in '68, Fontaine and Belkacem had just met, and began conspiring on an experimental theater 'happening' named Niok. When it opened, serendipity had avant-garde jazz quartet the Art Ensemble of Chicago performing across the road at the American Center on Boulevard Raspail. Destiny, it seems, was bringing them together. Though at different ends of the musical spectrum, the two French artists and the American jazzniks saw a shared spirit of adventure, and set out on a journey into uncharted musical territories.
Upgrade and Afterlife
Four decades on, and Comme à la Radio still sounds magical: an alchemical experiment of fusing songform with avant-gardism that manages to sound both effortless and studied; a cross-cultural, cross-genre marriage that manages to transcend its naked ambitions and birth a new musical form with, seemingly, every single spin.
Often working around a centralized 'space,' the songs foreground Fontaine's half-sung, half-spoken poetry, which avoids traditional notions of rhyme and meter, fashioning rhythms with the sense of interior monologues, or half-imagined lullabies. Belkacem, who's largely responsible for the arrangements, uses many of the musical markers of North African music —hand percussion, natural drones— but counter-balances them with traditional Western classical timbres like cello and piano. And the Art Ensemble of Chicago, rather than firing-out twin sax honk or blustering avant-gardism, work within the framework of the shape-shifting songs: their oddball woodwinds and Malachi Favors Maghostut's melodic, wandering bassplaying remaining forever alive to Fontaine's every discursive intonation.
Though its elements can seem amusical when parsed separately, Comme à la Radio is no work of ornery experimentation. Its various musical elements are all, at essence, deconstructive —Fontaine breaking down traditional song-forms, Belkacem musical/cultural boundaries, the AEC the increasingly-stringent definition of 'jazz'— but the album has a magnificent sense of wholeness, of togetherness; the players united, on these dozen songs, in the desire to discover a musical 'other'.
