Comme à la radio

The approach

Centrepiece of the eponymous album (Saravah, 1969). Duration: 8 minutes and 4 seconds. Recorded following a series of concerts at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Paris. Brigitte Fontaine delivers her text over Areski Belkacem’s percussion and the free brass of the full Art Ensemble of Chicago — Don Moye (drums), Lester Bowie (trumpet), Roscoe Mitchell (saxophones), Joseph Jarman (woodwinds), Malachi Favors (double bass). Produced by Pierre Barouh. Grand Prix du Disque, Académie Charles Cros, 1969.

Text structure

The text is a succession of surrealist poetic fragments without apparent narrative thread. Fontaine speaks to the radio as one would speak to a living being — intimate, off-kilter, slightly askew from the world. Images do not follow a causal logic but by phonic and rhythmic association: the sound of words governs their succession more than their meaning.

• opening: apostrophe to the radio as interlocutor
• fragments on solitude and impossible communication
• surrealist images drawn from distorted everyday life
• circular returns — the title comes back as a mantra
• end: dissolution into repetition

There is no conventional chorus. What returns is the title half-sung, half-declaimed — the only fixed melodic line in a stream of free speech.

The technique — voice as percussion

Brigitte Fontaine does not sing on this recording — she speaks. The voice is treated as a percussion instrument: the tonic accents of French become strikes, liaisons and elisions become rhythmic connectors, silences become strong beats. Delivery is the rhythm. This vocal grammar dialogues directly with Areski’s percussion — two sources of verbal and physical rhythm organised in counterpoint.

The Art Ensemble’s free jazz does not provide “accompaniment” in the traditional sense. It provides an unstable sonic space in which the voice can inscribe or oppose itself. When the brass rises, Fontaine slows her delivery. When the percussion recedes, she accelerates. This is a conversation, not an illustration.

Arrangement

No fixed harmonic structure. The Art Ensemble plays in free mode — no central tonality, no chord changes. The brass of Bowie and Mitchell organise themselves as textures rather than melodic lines: sonic clouds, clusters, instrumental cries. Favors’s double bass provides minimal anchoring — a few notes, long sustained tones, inhabited silences.

The mix places Fontaine’s voice at the centre, slightly forward, but without isolating it: one can clearly hear that she is in the same room as the Art Ensemble, in the same recorded moment. This is the capture of an encounter in real time.

Filiation and resonances

French lineage: the surrealism of Prévert and Desnos, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Barbara’s dramatic chanson — but all of this displaced toward something more physical, less literary. Fontaine comes from avant-garde theatre, not the chanson tradition.

American lineage: the Art Ensemble of Chicago is in 1969 the most advanced representative of Chicago free jazz, heir to Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). This Franco-American encounter fits no pre-existing category — it creates one.

Later resonances: Beck and Sonic Youth cite this album as a founding reference in the 1990s. They will initiate Fontaine’s comeback — Sonic Youth co-signing Kékéland (2001). The loop is perfect: the album that announced the return is precisely the one that had been rediscovered by those who would make the return happen.

Reading in light of the permanences

Permanence 1 — Speech before song: nowhere else in Fontaine’s work is this permanence more legible. Eight minutes of text spoken, chanted, whispered over a free jazz substrate. Not a conventionally sung note. The voice is percussive, delivery is the rhythm. This is the definition of the permanence itself.

Permanence 2 — Radical collaboration: the Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1969, in Paris, at the height of the AACM — this is the most improbable encounter imaginable. An American radical free jazz ensemble and a French surrealist chanteuse. No commercial calculation can explain this pairing. That is precisely the Fontaine method: seek the interlocutor who should not work, and find that it works better than everything else.

If Brigitte Fontaine’s entire body of work had to be represented by a single piece, this would be it. Everything is here: the voice-declamation at its zero degree, the most radical collaboration of her career, free jazz as the only possible substrate for this particular gesture. The piece that set everything in motion — and that still determines, sixty years later, how every subsequent album is read.

Critique + listening — no published score