My Love for The Swingle Singers (with MJQ) and Les Double Six

 

My Love for The Swingle Singers (with MJQ) and Les Double Six

Elek Bacsik - Jazz Guitarist (1963) by Tosh Berman

 

Elek Bacsik - Jazz Guitarist (1963) by Tosh Berman

Serge Gainsbourg - Ce mortel ennui (1964)

Sort of the social distancing video from Serge Gainsbourg.  Well, almost.  Nevertheless, a brilliant visual with the great Serge.  Throughout his long career, I think I love him the most during the late 1950s and early 60s.  But again, when you buy or listen to Gainsbourg, your getting quality.  - Tosh Berman​

Boris Vian - The sheik of araby

Boris Vian and his brother on drums.  Rare, because it is, footage of Boris doing music.

"Yé-Yé Girls Of '60's French Pop" by Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe

Feral House ISBN 978-1-936239-71-9

The mysterious and always foreign world of the French Yé-Yé  music scene.  Without a doubt the book I published "Gainsbourg the Biography" by Gilles Verlant is the best book in English regarding not only the Yé-Yé movement, but also the entire French music world.  The second book to get (in English) is Jean-Emmanuel Deluxe's "Yé-Yé Girls Of 60's French Pop."  This is a very good guide to the singers, the record labels, and the artists/songwriters that wrote the songs for this particular market.  It is basically teenage music, but mostly written by older men, for instance Serge Gainsbourg.  But beyond that it is a fascinating sub-culture to fish in, because the music, overall, is a the very least super interesting, and at its best- excellent records.

There are those who are the queens of their field - France Gall, Françoise Hardy, and Sylvie Vartan and then there are various (actually many many ) one-hit wonders, who also made great records as well.  In France, the arranger as well as the songwriter are part of the magic that makes a great record. Usually I check out who the arranger is, and then my money quickly goes to that release, especially if it is someone like Jean-Claude Vannier, who did a lot of classic recordings with Gainsbourg.  His touch of genius always shows up no matter who the artist or singer is - so it is very much like following your favorite record producer - or am I the only one who buys records due to the production credits?

Deluxe's book, which is also well-illustrated with both ads from the '60's as well as the original  record covers, pretty much covers the basics as well as the odd releases that came out of this scene.  So for sure its a good guide to have on your side of the table as one explores YouTube footage or online shops.  He also covers current music figures like April March, who is fantastic by the way, and others who were influenced by the 60's scene.  I think he could avoid a lot of the bands/artists, and just focus on the 60's artists, but that is a very small criticism.  This book is designed for the beginner who is looking for hardcore information or names to get their listening habits in order.   So yeah I highly recommend this book as a beginner's guide and if you want to get deeper into the subject do get the Verlant Gainsbourg biography.

Juan Rodriguez's review of "Gainsbourg the Biography" by Gilles Verlant

Serge Gainsbourg’s place in French music was thoroughly investigated by Gilles Verlant, whose biography of the singer is now available in an English translation. (Photo: Les Francofolies de Montréal)

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/music/Juan+Rodriguez+Serge+Gainsbourg+genius+lost/7677345/story.html

By Juan Rodriguez, special to The Gazette

Serge Gainsbourg was short, had elephantine ears, a large nose, bug eyes, a foul mouth, and a motto: “For me, provocation is oxygen.” He smoked like a chimney. He was also as successful a skirt-chaser (Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, France Gall and Jane Birkin were among his most well-known conquests) as he was a brilliant songwriter (a majority of his interpreters were women), master of the double entendre.

He was loaded with anti-charisma — his first words to Whitney Houston on a TV show were “I want to f--- you” — yet he was a perverse charmer. “Women adore misogynists,” he claimed; one of his preferred pickup lines was “Mind if I sit down, you little tart?” French president François Mitterrand characterized him as “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire,” but his various musical periods also qualified him as the Picasso of pop. (He stole liberally from Chopin.)

Apart from the admirable but hardly complete A Fistful of Gitanes, by Sylvie Simmons (author of the recent excellent Leonard Cohen biography I’m Your Man), there’s not much in English on the great iconoclast of French pop. Now comes the English translation of Serge Gainsbourg by Gilles Verlant (under the title Gainsbourg: The Biography, from Tam Tam Books), the French journalist who spent more time interviewing Gainsbourg than any other.
The depth of his investigation into the agent provocateur’s place in French music is abundant throughout this hefty 575-page tome, originally published in 2000. Without indulging into too much armchair psychology, we come away with plenty of raison d’être for the man who was forced to wear a yellow Jewish star as an adolescent during the Nazi occupation. He boomeranged the anti-Semitism of those times with perverse irony on the 1975 album Rock Around the Bunker.

He was born Lucien Ginsburg to parents who fled the Russian Revolution and anti-Semitism; his father, Joseph, was a classical pianist who played nightclub gigs to get by; his mother, Olia, was a mezzo-soprano.

The household was cultured (attuned to André Breton, Man Ray et al), something overlooked in Gainsbourg’s penchant for scandal. At the beginning of his career, he suffered from stage fright and was discouraged because of his apparent “ugliness.” He was hardly in the league of Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Georges Brassens or Yves Montand as a romantic hero, yet his power to shock — in either a disquieting sense or with inimitable irreverence (setting La Marseillaise to a stoned reggae beat) — set him apart, and was somehow more profound than his more genteel contemporaries. When some suggested that his biggest international hit, Je t’aime ... moi non plus, was simply a tape of Gainsbourg and Birkin engaged in sex, he quipped: “Thank goodness it wasn’t, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-player.”

Despite being littered with typos, the book is a page-turner. Although translator Paul Knobloch has drawn some heat for supposedly taking liberties, his adaptation of Gainsbourg’s lyrics is pure genius; most of the translations rhyme — an extraordinarily difficult creative act.

Alongside Simmons’s tome on Cohen, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown by R.J. Smith, and Gustav Mahler by Jens Malte Fischer, this is among the very best musical biographies I’ve read this year.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/music/Juan+Rodriguez+Serge+Gainsbourg+genius+lost/7677345/story.html

TamTam Books' Tribute to Andre Hodeir

Andre Hodeir is very much a mysterious figure to me - because its difficult to find his work and I suspect that he may be obscure in his native country France.  But saying that, Hodeir is a Jazz composer/arranger and a jazz theorist.  He has written numerous books like down below

"Andre Hodeir Jazz Reader" is still in print as far as I know and its a great collection of his writings on Jazz.   As for his other books I usually find them in very literate used bookstores in various parts of the world.  Grove used to issue his books during the 1960's.  

I discovered Hodeir through my obsession on Boris Vian.  He knew Vian, and in 1968 he did the soundtrack to L'écume des jours, which is....fan-tas-tic.  One of the best music EP's I have ever heard.  A mixture of classical, jazz and early electronics.   It took me forever to find an original copy of the disk

You can hear a touch of the music in this clip from the film:

 But when I did, I totally forgot what I paid for it.  A lot of money (at the time) but like something pleasurable that has pain attached to it - you forget the pain and only the pleasure stays in your mind and ears, in the particular case.    

His album "Jazz et Jazz" is probably his masterpiece.  A collection of uber-cool orchestrated jazz music with the title cut being probably one of the great eccentric recordings of the 50's.   The spirit of Joe Meek is in Andre Hodeir and the spirit is in Meek as well.   Listen to this amazing piece of music:

Jazz et Jazz by Andre Hodeir

Here's rare footage of Andre Hodeir conducting a band featuring Roger Guerin doing "Jordu."

Here are some cuts from the incredible "Kenny Clarke Plays Andre Hodeir

Here is Andre Hodeir with the great Christiane Legrand, Henri Crolla,  "Une Parisienne OST

Some very early Hodeir music:

James Moody with Strings.  Arranged and conducted by Andre Hodeir:

Here are some of his album covers:

Hodeir at work!