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Sam 17 jan. – Sale Petit Bonhomme

Trapped within the contraptions of modern jazz evolutions, one might not notice the ferocity acoustic instruments are capable of. After so many fortunate and unfortunate experiences relating either to the ‘fusion’ genre, or to the neo-psychedelic and the freaky funk-reggae-world music experiments, I just wanted acoustic. I craved for it. And so, after being tortured with so many electronics, with organs, electric violins, and awfully programmed percussions, I felt that ‘acoustic’ was the equivalent of ‘what are the girls made of’: sugar, spice, and everything nice. Yet, last night I have been acoustically tortured. And the torturer was the ‘Dirty Undersized Guy’, for that is what ‘Sale Petit Bonhomme’, the name of the group, means.
I cannot say the band was bad. I surely cannot state that the band was exceptional. For me, the band is pretty much OK, and I am simply implying that the band is on its way to something. It should probably be worth listening to in a couple of years. Not now, nevertheless… This five-piece group relies on Django-style played electric guitar, mainly doing harmonics. The guitarist was – as they introduced him, Aurélien, and he is probably the most gifted of the entire group. To his left on the scene (and to our right) there stood – if my hearing were any good – Elise, the violinist (I just guess the names, I risk misspelling them at times). She was playing OK, not as if she were spectacular at any rate, and she started doing Stéphane Grappelli impressions, almost necessary to complement the style of the guitarist; that was good. It was catchy, somehow, and later on she even assumed the female role in certain dialogued songs. In the centre, well balanced by the other members of the group, was Jean-Jacques, twenty years older than the rest, the main vocalist, playing acoustic guitar in a Georges Brassens style. His constant references to his bald head, to his womanising habits and too many other French perennial jokes transformed the group in his ‘The Band’, the accompanying act of a misplaced Poitou-living Bod Dylan. In the end, Jean-Jacques even tried a Bob Dylan cover (I call it a cover, it was more likely a reassembled song), with changed lyrics and harmonics, but the audience, entirely French, did not grasp the San Francisco air of the thing. They only took it as bluegrass and started doing a misplaced ‘yupee-yaa’, as if we were about to dance the Cotton-Eyed-Joe. That very moment, a blond groupie and a guy started dancing around the hall. Only once, unfortunately. Twice or thrice would have been the magic number.
Small bits of Klezmer, tiny references to reggae, and a little bit of Arab style seasoned the rest of the songs, but the problem lies not – as expected – in the communication between the rhythm section and the harmonics. The contrabassist was OK, and the drummer was extremely good. A little bit too young, for be banged the drums too hard at times, but they were doing great and the guitarist and the violinist have, as I’ve noticed many times throughout the concert, good improvisational skills. The problem lies within the dialogue between Jean-Jacques, the vocalist and composer of the group, and the others. From time to time, during each song, certain contrapunts were abruptly performed in order to allow him the recitation of the song. Jean-Jacques is an old-school ‘chanson française’ player, he recites, he does not sing. His idol might be – probably – Brassens, and he could be playing OK in a pub, entertaining a small audience with French popular jokes and love-targeted lyrics. With a band, nonetheless, he fails the performance. He is extremely static; he rarely moves and does it as if he were badly acting. On the contrary, the violinist and the guitarist just wanted to dance. I could see her hips moving as she fiddled Klezmer, I could see the guitarist’s legs going up and down as he played his Django replicas. They wanted to have a good time and the drummer banged his contraptions to the point of bursting out of the chair. They are a live band and they could greatly improvise were they allowed the necessary coordinates. With a stiff vocalist and with ‘chanson française’ songs, they failed to create the atmosphere too.
This does not imply that I do not like the ‘chanson française’. On the contrary, I often listen to Brassens, and I am a great fan of Laurent Montagne. I simply adore the later and I would die for a concert ticket to one of his acts. I would have probably enjoyed Jean-Jacques at the ‘Serrurerie’, a pub in Poitiers, but him alone, playing his French guitar jokes while I would have sipped my late night coffee before starting to write. I would also have liked the other members of the band during a concert in a large hall. Certain songs had excellent introductions and one could easily understand that the arrangements were made by the non-singing members of ‘Sale petit bonhomme’. The second or third song started in the vein of an Oregon theme, others turned to neo-psychedelic, a street-fashion in France, where everybody plays percussions and world-music instruments in the parks. I also liked the Grappelli impressions of the violinist, but all in all, they were misplaced by the blunt and monotone main structure of the songs. What I came to think about the band is that the four instrument players would be worth listening to while doing improvisation during rehearsals. There was a certain communion between the four, and they would be great playing world-music inspired jazz, without lyrics.
Last but not least, I could not fail to notice my presence there as an intruder. The band was not moving, yet some of the songs were supposed to be danced. What's more, the public didn’t move either; nobody moved. The stage arrangements with four vaulted windows and doors made out of hard paper wanted to create the intimate impression of an open patio, where people feel at home and have fun as they please. But, since the band was not moving, one couldn’t fail to notice that the arrangements were not real, they were an evident buttafuori. Moreover, the concert was for their friends, who encouraged them wildly from the last rows of the audience, but the rest of the audience was silent; they did not interact since they knew not the members of the band on a personal level. Strangely, since their 20 or so friends in the back shouted, cheered and applauded, we were gratified in the end with a doubled ‘encore’ and an encored ‘encore’, continuously following the doubled one. There was no magic in the show, even though there could have been created out of the hesitantly blunt sketches of dialogues and intermediate jokes in between the songs. There was no dialogue with the public; there was only a constant monologue, the same joke repeated over and over, as a sort of auto-critical approach which was meant to improve the quality of the music. Everything was static, for everything centred on the vocalist. And the vocalist was static, as static as one gets. I was – as I have already said – an intruder, spying into someone’s private bathroom. And that someone, the ‘Sale petit bonhomme’ was just singing in the shower. I returned home and listened to some Archie Shepp.