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Stepping into Ghéédalia Tazartèès’s Paris apartment is not unlike entering a parallel reality. A single room, perhaps five metres wide and 15 metres long, with a minuscule kitchen annex, it’s immaculately tidy yet crammed with an overwhelming array of objects. Meticulously ordered shelves contain layers of books, CDs and knick-knacks. The walls burst forth with paintings, drawings, brass ornaments, oddshaped panes of mirrored glass and arcane bric-abrac. Instruments – keyboards, synthesizers, a harmonium – are filed neatly under cabinets and arranged precisely on tabletops. A wood-carved ram’s head with massive horns hangs from one wall, a child’s bicycle from another. When Tazartèès mentions that he has lived here since 1967, and that all his albums have been recorded in this selfcontained space, it’s hard not to think of the apartment’s sensory overload as a visual representation of his music. “I have some kind of superstition about this place,” he remarks. “Without it, I don’t know if I am a musician.” The apartment is in the Bastille area of Paris, just east of the city centre. A couple of hundred metres west along the Rue de Faubourg Saint-Antoine is the Opééra Bastille, commissioned by Francois Mitterand in the late 1980s. Tazartèès lives almost in the building’s shadow, but his music is the very inverse of the state-approved high culture it represents. Over the past three decades Tazartèès has issued eight albums, from his 1977 debut Diasporas to last year’s Hystéérie Off Music, which juxtapose his pan-global vocals with synthesizer improvisations, raw drones and loops, found sound cut-ups and pounding percussion in outrageous jump-cutting montages. Often cacophonous, typically bewildering and rich in paradox, Tazartèès’s music blurs genres and conflates styles, creating a complex yet primitive musical form which is utterly sui generis. Tazartèès himself is an enigmatic presence lurking in the margins. Upon meeting him it soon becomes apparent that his mystique and lack of profile are not cultivated. Gregarious and warm, a witty and generous conversationalist, he lacks any desire to promote his music, and consequently is ignored by an uninterested, uncomprehending public. Rarely interviewed (“No one asks,” he shrugs), he hasn’t performed live in many years. Yet 2007 saw the release of two albums of new material, after just one in the preceding 15 years. He will make a return to performance this month at the Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton, and an archival recording is scheduled for release later this year. So occluded a figure is Tazartèès that this small amount of activity constitutes a career renaissance. As he serves up piping hot espresso in weathered wine glasses, interpreter Dan Warburton and I sit down to listen to his story. Ghéédalia Tazartèès (pronounced Gay-da-lee-ah Ta-zartez) was born in Paris in 1947 and grew up in the Bois de Vincennes area, in the east of the city. His formative musical experience came at the age of nine, when his father played him Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. “We listened to it together, I loved it, I played it again and again,” he recalls. “I told myself that I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to play music.” He reminisces fondly about time spent in the wooded park at Bois de Vincennes. “It was important for me as a musician to be close to the woods. I used to spend a lot of time alone in the woods singing, without thinking, without being a musician. I sang really loud, I used to make the ducks tremble on the lake.” At age 13, wracked with grief at the death of his grandmother, “I dug a hole for myself in the woods and sang alone for a very long time. I went back home to sleep, but I went back to the woods to sing.” He was weaned on jazz, blues (“Coltrane, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Roland Kirk”) and popular music: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. His early musical development was a tale of frustration and failure: “I took piano lessons, but I wasn’t very disciplined. Because I didn’t get very good marks at school my dad stopped the lessons. So from the age of 13 I was looking for an instrument. The piano was too big. I wanted something I could carry around. So I rented a saxophone and I wasn’t any good at that. I rented a violin, but it was too difficult. I finally understood when I was 20 that it was the voice.” 24 THE WIRE GHÉÉDALIA TAZARTÈÈS
page 25
“I sing in a language which I invented myself, for my own music. My parents spoke Spanish together so the kids wouldn’t understand. I invented my own language so they wouldn’t understand me” The realisation occurred shortly before the éévéénements of May 1968. Committing himself to the revolutionary cause, Tazartèès dropped out of music altogether. He spent the next five years working in factories, “because at the time it was cool to work in a factory. I was a factory worker at General Motors for nearly a year but I worked in about ten different factories. Since I was there to be a revolutionary, I didn’t stay there very long. I was a bigmouth, a militant.” One day in 1973 it dawned on him that he could no longer advocate revolution because it would involve “too much death”, so he turned his hand to painting, “which wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t see any way to make a living out of it”, before chancing upon a tape recorder. “It was the instrument I’d been looking for – I could sing, listen to it, sing, listen to it again. I could accompany myself. It allowed for bursts of inspiration. That’s what I liked about it. I realised I could start making music.” An encounter with Michel Chion (see The Wire 294) provided a turning point. “Chion talked about what he did as oeuvres, works of art. I would never have described what I did as works of art. But at least he gave me the idea that what I was doing was music.” They certainly make an odd pair, the musique concrèète composer and theorist and the primitivist autodidact, but Chion’s influence was crucial, as was the encouragement of a sculptor friend. “These two people opened my spirit,” he recalls. The 1970s were a fertile time for French music. The artists and groups who clustered around labels like Pôôle and Futura, the anarchic Improv of Jac Berrocal and his cohorts, even the Prog excesses of Heldon and Etron Fou Leloublan – all could be regarded as spirits in some way kindred to Tazartèès. But at the time he recorded his first album, Diasporas (1977), for the Cobalt label, he had listened to “nothing avant garde” and was completely unaware of them all, which is surely one reason why his music sounds so distinctive. Counterpointed with muffled drones, cut-ups and outlandish instrumental barrages, Tazartèès’s vocals – moaning, groaning, trilling, ululating, keening, screaming – steal the show. His astonishingly malleable voice, by turns masculine, feminine and childlike, evokes a slew of ethnic musics – Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, African and Middle Eastern – often in the space of a single track, borrowing their phrasing and rhythms, alluding to their timbre, catching their textural grain. Tazartèès’s engagement with these musics sounds rivetingly authentic, but Diasporas was in fact an exercise in fake ethnography conducted with JeanPierre Lentin, a journalist and editor of the popular countercultural magazine Actuel. “We thought we’d do something that hadn’t been done before, as a laugh, where he could write a little text describing the ethnic music of a region which we invented, with a little story about each track. Each track had a particular function, to chase away birds for hunters, or something. And the music would be mine. Nothing was researched, it was all spontaneous.” The source material was improvised and then edited together, a working method he’s favoured ever since. “My music is 100 per cent chance,” he grins. The register of the album changes frequently and usually abruptly but, for Tazartèès, jump-cut edits have their own logic. “When you’re watching a film, you can be in the street one moment and inside an apartment the next, and you’re not shocked at all. I’m not using an instrument where I have to slow down to go from one thing to another. My instrument is the tape recorder, which is like a camera.” Tazartèès’s collaboration with Lentin continued on his second album, 1980’s Transports. “I produced it myself because I wanted to make an anonymous record – with my name on the cover and nothing else on the record, just like a found object. The things I was listening to most at the time were Baroque, preBaroque music, and when I looked at the names of the composers on the record it said ‘Anonymous’,” he laughs. “I thought ‘Anonymous’ was a great composer.” Transports is pockmarked with abrasive and noisy instrumentals, with Tazartèès’s vocals less prominent, on occasion sped up or backmasked. He ascribes the album’s saturnine demeanour to Lentin being responsible for choosing the tracks from a bunch of recordings, and the prominence of a Moog synthesizer, which he’d purchased in the UK shortly GHÉÉDALIA TAZARTÈÈS THE WIRE 25

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Stepping into Ghéédalia Tazartèès’s Paris apartment is not unlike entering a parallel reality. A single room, perhaps five metres wide and 15 metres long, with a minuscule kitchen annex, it’s immaculately tidy yet crammed with an overwhelming array of objects. Meticulously ordered shelves contain layers of books, CDs and knick-knacks. The walls burst forth with paintings, drawings, brass ornaments, oddshaped panes of mirrored glass and arcane bric-abrac. Instruments – keyboards, synthesizers, a harmonium – are filed neatly under cabinets and arranged precisely on tabletops. A wood-carved ram’s head with massive horns hangs from one wall, a child’s bicycle from another. When Tazartèès mentions that he has lived here since 1967, and that all his albums have been recorded in this selfcontained space, it’s hard not to think of the apartment’s sensory overload as a visual representation of his music. “I have some kind of superstition about this place,” he remarks. “Without it, I don’t know if I am a musician.” The apartment is in the Bastille area of Paris, just east of the city centre. A couple of hundred metres west along the Rue de Faubourg Saint-Antoine is the Opééra Bastille, commissioned by Francois Mitterand in the late 1980s. Tazartèès lives almost in the building’s shadow, but his music is the very inverse of the state-approved high culture it represents. Over the past three decades Tazartèès has issued eight albums, from his 1977 debut Diasporas to last year’s

Hystéérie Off Music, which juxtapose his pan-global vocals with synthesizer improvisations, raw drones and loops, found sound cut-ups and pounding percussion in outrageous jump-cutting montages. Often cacophonous, typically bewildering and rich in paradox, Tazartèès’s music blurs genres and conflates styles, creating a complex yet primitive musical form which is utterly sui generis. Tazartèès himself is an enigmatic presence lurking in the margins. Upon meeting him it soon becomes apparent that his mystique and lack of profile are not cultivated. Gregarious and warm, a witty and generous conversationalist, he lacks any desire to promote his music, and consequently is ignored by an uninterested, uncomprehending public. Rarely interviewed (“No one asks,” he shrugs), he hasn’t performed live in many years. Yet 2007 saw the release of two albums of new material, after just one in the preceding 15 years. He will make a return to performance this month at the Colour Out Of Space festival in Brighton, and an archival recording is scheduled for release later this year. So occluded a figure is Tazartèès that this small amount of activity constitutes a career renaissance. As he serves up piping hot espresso in weathered wine glasses, interpreter Dan Warburton and I sit down to listen to his story.

Ghéédalia Tazartèès (pronounced Gay-da-lee-ah Ta-zartez) was born in Paris in 1947 and grew up in the

Bois de Vincennes area, in the east of the city. His formative musical experience came at the age of nine, when his father played him Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. “We listened to it together, I loved it, I played it again and again,” he recalls. “I told myself that I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to play music.” He reminisces fondly about time spent in the wooded park at Bois de Vincennes. “It was important for me as a musician to be close to the woods. I used to spend a lot of time alone in the woods singing, without thinking, without being a musician. I sang really loud, I used to make the ducks tremble on the lake.” At age 13, wracked with grief at the death of his grandmother, “I dug a hole for myself in the woods and sang alone for a very long time. I went back home to sleep, but I went back to the woods to sing.” He was weaned on jazz, blues (“Coltrane, John Lee Hooker, Charlie Parker, Ray Charles, Roland Kirk”) and popular music: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. His early musical development was a tale of frustration and failure: “I took piano lessons, but I wasn’t very disciplined. Because I didn’t get very good marks at school my dad stopped the lessons. So from the age of 13 I was looking for an instrument. The piano was too big. I wanted something I could carry around. So I rented a saxophone and I wasn’t any good at that. I rented a violin, but it was too difficult. I finally understood when I was 20 that it was the voice.”

24 THE WIRE GHÉÉDALIA TAZARTÈÈS

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