We get used to questions like "what is punk", what are the blues?" "what is jazz?". We want it all nailed down. We're searching for a spirit that lives in some kinds of music and suffocates in others.
But when it comes down to it the spirit is our own and the music enlivens it or not – depending on our own experience and character, our own preferences, moods and preoccupations. These can themselves be changed overnight of course. A new love, a good teacher, a sudden epiphany, a change of country.
So is a CD any good? Hmm. Who’s asking? I can at least tell you that this one came in a large pile of review items and was the only one that I was really looking forward to hearing. LES SIX and the avant garde of Paris music in 1917 are excitingly outside my experience, and LTM (Albeit on specialist imprint Salon) are so consistently the source of musical delights that I knew I was in for an education if not a treat.
And I'm not disappointed. This is fresh, vigorous stuff with more than a hint of punk. People yelled and threw stuff at some of the early shows, the press made up the story that the six composers were a real group. Influential people like Picasso, Cocteau the film maker and Satie the composer got involved. Radical Russian ballet, with Picasso sets and costumes was staged and Cocteau reads out a couple of poems (La Toison d'Or and "Les Voleurs d'Enfants") against a background score played by the Dan Parrish Jazz Orchestra. Satie went to prison for harassing a critic and died of alcoholism in 1925. Francis Poulenc (One of LES SIX) denounced their one important collaborative work as "shit" and pretty well everybody fell out with everybody else.
Rock and Roll.
Oh, and Georges Auric, another member of LES SIX wrote film scores for Cocteau before and after the second war.
Somehow all this madness is represented in the music and words to be heard on the CD and set out in careful detail in the very neat little booklet that comes with it.
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The first six pieces (One short and pithy work from each composer of LES SIX) take up the first section. The music wasn't especially novel even a the time. But the new recordings here, with Andrew West playing piano are open hearted and accessible – the parallels with Satie's best known work – the Gymnopedies - are there to be heard, but on the whole it’s much more upbeat than those dreamy pieces.
The longer piece that Satie wrote for 1917's "Parade" is rich stuff. Played by the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Jiri Horvat, it’s full of "modernist" sounding instrumentation and attack. Typewriters, Chinese gongs, gunshots and big fat rasping trombones – plus tunes – make it pretty irrepressible and enjoyable. The other extended piece on the CD is a South American jazz influenced orchestral work by one of LES SIX, Darius Milhaud. "Le Bouef sur le Toit" sounds like it could have been a source of inspiration for Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story". (There is a recording of Bernstein conducting the piece in 1977, I note). Trumpet players should give this a listen.
The poems have a nice Bonzo Dog feel , with somewhat better msucianship and a well enunciated French accent on audibly ancient recordings. The film music is in short pieces, copied from original prints, and has a delicious antique feel – plunderphonics will love it. Its liveliness and variety makes it loads of fun to listen to.
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