Both a jazz drummer and ethnomusicologist, Jean Schwarz offers a unique vision that expands upon Luc Ferrari’s imagined Presque Rien environments and the tweaked rhythmic workouts of Bernard Parmegiani’s Pop’eclectic series of jazz collages. Throughout, Schwarz incorporates extensive usage of field recording, cyclic minimalist rhythm beds and the slow-moving resonances of electronic tone textures, playing with the sounds of French cafe musette, soulful jazz, and expansive audio vistas of desolate beaches or tropical gardens. The resulting effect plays out like a live remix deconstruction of a Fellini or Godard film, heavily cinematic and visually poetic in execution.
Quatre Vingts (1987/89), 62'19 At the end of the eighties, it seemed interesting to me to draw a sound image of our time, as the photographer might do. The point was not to give any judgment or to be sermonizing, it might have been artless and vain. This piece is only the subjective look of our surroundings and the sound pollution, such as pictures taken through a certain angle. With modesty, I wish that these passed years should be reminded when this work is listened to. Vent d'est 18'48 The murdered hope in may 1989 sprang up again during fall, then in winter. The bells from Prague, silent since ages, ranged again in November blowed by the perestroika wind. There is an adagio followed by a rhythmic part in this movement. Orchestra and church bells pulse this first part crossed by choir elements treated as for a requiem. The rhythmic part is built around several ostinatos with many accumulations of several materials in which run hymns fragments. Kind of 6'09 Some recent plagues reflect our consumers society: benefit, unemployment, gallup polls, communication. We must state that during the passed ten years, we attended their rise following an exponential curve. For the musician, it is the delight of new technologies where fascination and despair keep close, for all the equipment gets out of date very soon. This movement anticipates future disillusions bounded to the choice offered by the multiplicity of synthesizers, samplers, micro-computers, midi devices... Shit FM 7'35 The saddest invention for music is truly the rhythm machine box with all the sound pollution it has generated. It is even worse to bear it through a neighboor's walkman. Square 6'18 At the very beginning there was the blues reminded us Duke Ellington. Y a pas d'quoi-plus jamais ça. 10' 17 One has to make weapons, this allows employments. One has to sell them to get foreign currencies. One has to use them, then make war. All political speeches are connected to that point; anyway no one denies it.
Nazism remembrance is not so far; Shoah, Holocaust, “The Sorrow and the Pity” broadcasting on TV stood out the latest years. As stated by J.-L. Godard, our TV managers ought to broadcast these films every month. Unless the audience should be taken into consideration... Tchernobyl 12'25 We avoided the final solution, but for how long? A song of hope from all countries raises up and the future belongs to Cinderella's children. The mountbank I am suscribes to a rather pessimistic vision due to the actual conjuncture, to the audiovisual anarchy we live in and to this rulers utopia definitely willing to make profit out of research and creation. Produced in Celia Records Studio, 1987/89 Commissioned by INA grm.
