In the 1957 movie
Love in the Afternoon, Gary Cooper has this four-piece Gypsy orchestra (I would say
Band of Gypsys, but that is a reference that leads in a different, yet equally fulfilling, direction from the one in which I'm going) that he keeps on retainer to play live music while he woos an interchangeable sweetheart in his Paris hotel suite. (Maurice Chevalier plays a detective who blames Cooper for seducing about 99 44/100ths of the respectable-wife population of Paris; turnabout is fair play when his daughter Audrey Hepburn gets involved with Cooper.)
The band, with a hammer-dulcimer, a guitar, an accordion, and a violinist, plays the same repertory every night for Gary Cooper; neither the music nor the seductive approach ever changes. That repertory consists of these Gypsy-sounding arrangements of standard pop tunes.
The idea that I could banter flirtatiously with girls like Audrey Hepburn in a deluxe hotel to the romantic soundtrack of a real live Gypsy four-piece combo was definitely one of the reasons I went to Paris last year, but unfortunately I couldn't track those guys down.
As I've mentioned before, I found plenty of other music to entertain me. One I couldn't find, however, was
Big Yum Yum, who came
highly recommended by
raw_u:
Later I found an obscure cd at Boulinier, with familiar-looking graphics on the cover. Big Yum Yum is a project Fabio Viscogliosi had in the 90's with some students of a music school. Instrumental remakes of their cinema-tune favourites. Really excellent, downtempo chill out lo-fi music.. (I tried the same pawing through the used-CD bins at Boulinier and wound up instead with the indomitable jazz vocalist
Marjolaine Reymond.)
BYY's
Clic Clac did surface on
emusic, recently, however, and I finally had the opportunity to catch up with it. What I found is a record of the kind of music that I would expect those gypsies to make on their time off. The arrangements are sparse, tight, and romantic not in an overblown
Léo Marjane (or even
Feist) way, but in their directness and simplicity. Some of them are simple enough to make excellent ringtones (disclaimer:
Three Girl Rhumba is to me the most perfect ringtone: instantly identifiable, slashing, and direct, it says "Jonathan, pick up the phone" better than any other song I can think of.) Since the BYY heads are mostly taken from soundtracks of Nouvelle Vague movies, BYY is probably an excellent corrective to all that overblown floor-show-orchestra music you've seen in CD bins lately, like
Pink Martini and
Nouvelle Vague. In fact, the music's simplicity approaches the bitpop esthetic that we're familiar with from
BEREP-recommended artists such as
Tanguy Ukulele Orchestra and
Aleksi Eeben, but not from the humorous direction, from the opposite, dub-serious one, as if melodica-playing
Augustus Pablo and
Lee "Scratch" Perry had collaborated on a version of
Miles Davis's soundtrack to
L'ascenseur à l'echafaud.
The outstanding track on
Clic Clac in my opinion is their version of the
Jeanne Moreau classic from
Jules et Jim,
Le tourbillon. They do it up in the aforementioned
dub style so that what in Jeanne's definitive version is a kind of
lullaby sounds better suited for a
lap dance or striptease. It reminds me of the ghostly and beautiful
Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy version of
I Only Have Eyes for You, but earthy, not ethereal.
This is lounge music for people who are not lounging idly, but who have a purpose, like Gary Cooper's relentless, sharklike efforts at seducing Audrey Hepburn.
En tant que ça, BYY's music accompanies perfectly my more manic and directed moments, whether seducing my girlfriend or making dinner for Mom. In fact, as
Love in the Afternoon draws to its conclusion, the gypsies and their theme music (the old chestnut "Fascination") become even more incongruous; at Gary Cooper's most hectic and overwrought moment, they are playing as he takes Audrey Hepburn for a boat trip, shades of
Xochimilco. It's the same kind of old-wine-in-new-bottles vibe that animates the entire Clic Clac record.
