It sounds like a musical trainwreck in the making or the set-up for a joke about the excesses of the avant garde. A French chanteuse and a Kabyle musician meet an Afrocentric American free jazz band on a stage in Paris. Chaos ensues? Au contraire. If the 1971 record album Comme à la radio is any indicator, the audio was absolutely sublime. When she 1st took the stage with the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1969, Brigitte Fontaine was already called something of an outsider within the world of French pop. The vocalist, whose first album was addressed Brigitte Fontaine est folle! (”Brigitte Fontaine is Crazy”), was called a chanson singer with an odd feel of harmony. A France Gall with an ear for the atonal. But when she began acting with Areski Belkacem, a player from the North African part of the Parisian suburbias, she made a definitive break with the songs chanson custom. Together, the duo mixed North African beats and harmonic ideas with a sung-spoken absolve verse that sounded like the trippy French adaptation of beatnik rapping. And so, it didn’t require a huge abstract leap for the duo to join forces with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a aggroup with an abiding interest in non-Western beats and modalities. The Art Ensemble had acquired out of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative players (AACM), and, when it met Fontaine and Areski, the aggroup was in the midst of a three-year residency in Paris that would alter its artistic direction away from a lot conventional free jazz and towards a polyrhythmic world music coalition. At the time, the Art Ensemble had no drummer; each extremity of the band played percussion also a handful of other instruments. Like Areski, the extremities of the Art Ensemble were multi-instrumentalists with brief interest in any one dash of playing. A appropriate, if somewhat bizarre, match. The Art Ensemble, Fontaine, and Areski acted a series of concerts at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, where they practiced and perfected the material that would get Comme à la radio. Joined, for the recording sittings, by the Art Ensemble’s friend and fellow AACM member, cornetist Leo Smith, the group had developed a strikingly besotted sound for such a disparate array of instrumentalists. The Art Ensemble, for its part, allowed most of the skronk to Smith, bearing a harmonically restrained, modal take on the melodic material. “In,” rather than “out.” Fontaine’s voice, which wasn’t the most subtle instrument, all the same had a relaxed elegance and an apprehending suppleness that was most effective when she was exhalation the undertones of the notes she was singing.
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