In 1964, Serge Gainsbourg was nonetheless a little-known French jazz musician who, regardless of having lengthy earned his chops in native golf equipment (together with a stint backing Michèle Arnaud) and penned songs for Juliette Gréco (even then a dwelling icon), was closing in on his late 30s and despairing on the lack of significant curiosity within the 5 data he’d launched underneath his personal identify. So it might need been by despondency – although, simply as seemingly, sheer audacity – that he determined to document an Afro-Latin jazz album with zero precedent in French-language music, Gainsbourg Percussions, launched on October 26, 1964.
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Not that Gainsbourg invented the “world music” crossover with Gainsbourg Percussions – he was coming in on the tip of the exotica craze, for one – however he completed it with sufficient panache to at the very least make it really feel as if he had. Although “Quand Mon 6,35 Me Fait Les Yeux Doux” hitched itself to Gainsbourg’s extra established jazz, “Les Sambassadeurs” would have had no downside passing for the true deal on the Rio Carnival. And whereas Gainsbourg wasn’t inclined to creating overt political statements in his music, in its personal (now dated) method, “Couleur Café” is a “black is beautiful” present of help for the Civil Rights Motion in the US – notably coming proper after “New York – USA,” on which a feminine refrain rides the African rhythms, shadowing Gainsbourg as he reels off a litany of Huge Apple landmarks.
It was all completed with a distinctly Gainsbourgian shrug, making it look straightforward (it wasn’t: the musical association on “Pauvre Lola” is beautiful; Gainsbourg’s commanding vocals ooze confidence whereas the laughing feminine on high provides a sometimes off-kilter aspect) whereas additionally caring little for propriety. Certainly, it might subsequently emerge that he had wholesale lifted the music for 3 Gainsbourg Percussions songs (“Joanna,” “New York – USA” and “Marabout”) from Drums Of Ardour, a 1959 album by Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and a fourth, “Pauvre Lola,” from Miriam Makeba’s “Umqokozo.”
For Gainsbourg, this specific transfer maybe marked the start of his transformation into an iconoclastic shapeshifter. Hiding in plain sight, it now appears no much less audacious than casually burning a 500 franc be aware stay on tv (as he did, in 1984), or getting France Gall to sing the innuendo-laden “Les Sucettes” in 1966 – a sometimes perverse method to rejoice his long-awaited mainstream acceptance.
Serge knew easy methods to provoke folks in an effort to promote his genius, and, on this case, the musical appropriation factors each again and ahead – to rock’n’roll’s African roots and Paul Simon’s later sojourn in South Africa. It additionally set the template for one more of Gainsbourg’s controversies: getting Sly & Robbie and Rita Marley to assist him flip the French nationwide anthem into the flippantly delivered “Aux Armes Et Cætera” in 1979, concurrently dragging reggae into the French mainstream whereas turning himself right into a goal for dying threats.
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