The best a writer can hope for in profiling an artist is to capture something of the essence of the subject. In his attempt to do that, Italian journalist/critic Francesco Martinelli took an exemplary approach in compiling his discography of French bassist/improviser/composer Jöelle Léandre. Martinelli devoted one or two pages of this handsome volume to each recording that Léandre has appeared on, beginning with with her appearance on an eponymous release by Tristan Murail in 1978, continuing up to "Record no. 77," an album by vocalist Lauren Newton recorded in October, 2001.
But Martinelli went further than that, by also including reviews for many of the records, photographs, reproductions of posters, texts by Léandre herself, snatches of interviews, and a bit - not too much - critical commentary by Martinelli himself.
What emerges is a picture of a mature, driven artist who takes her work very seriously but also has a great deal of fun doing so. Anyone who has seen Léandre play knows that she is not above mugging during a performance, nor does she hold back from sly physical humour from time to time. And anyone who has heard or read "Taxi," which is inspired by comments by taxi drivers who encounter Léandre and her instrument, knows that she can be drop-dead hilarious.
But the humour is not mere frivolity; it rests on a solid foundation of musical training and experience, beginning with her studies on piano and bass as a child in Aix-en-Provence, and following that, training at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris, where she studied under Gaston Logerot and won First Prize for doublebass. Léandre became interested in jazz when she bought a used copy of Bowin' Singin' Slam by Slam Stewart because she was intrigued by the cover, which featured her instrument. Purchases of records by Mingus, Chambers, Garrison, and LaFaro followed, and she found in jazz a musical approach that explored all the possibilities of the bass, which classical music did not. Or, as she puts it, in classical music, the bass part is always written at the bottom of the score!
In Léandre, we find the attempt to reconcile what appear to be contradictions: seriousness and whimsy, conservative classicism and African-American jazz. Even in her two biggest musical influences, John Cage and Derek Bailey, we find her attracted to people whose musical approaches are quite dissimilar, to say the least. Nevertheless, the woman who calls John Cage her spiritual father is also regarded by some as one of the few musicians who Bailey is willing to engage head on-or vice versa.
Of course, Léandre has played with many of the leading improvising musicians in Europe, America, and Japan, and the discography is a testament to the notion that a person can be known by the company she keeps.
All of this begs the question: Is the person portrayed in the discography the same person one might encounter in the flesh?
In early September 2004, at the Guelph Jazz Festival, where Léandre performed with violinist India Cooke, I had the opportunity to sit down and discuss her life in music.
It was September 11, the day before Léandre's 53rd birthday. Relaxed following a beautiful concert with Cooke (a recording of the performance has recently been released on the Red Toucan label), she was looking forward to flying back to Berkeley early the next day, where she is teaching at Mills College. The evening before, when I had approached her about doing the interview, she had appeared a bit stressed, even a bit wary about my intentions. But when we set up on the back steps of the Guelph Youth Music Center, beside a jogging path that ran along the river, she was all charm and good humour, buoyed perhaps by her performance that morning and the warmth of the sunny, mid-September day.
For her part, she is effusive in her praise for Martinelli's work. That might be expected, given that the two worked closely together on the discography, but Léandre was knocked out by the amount of research that Martinelli put in to finding articles and reviews about her in various newspapers and magazines, a full list of which appears in the bibliography of the book.
Her bass is her partner. She agrees with the notion that one of her solo concerts might be considered a duo, between her and the bass. And improvisation is simply a process that's part of the process of life. There is, if any, very little separation between her life and her art. She tells a story of Cecil Taylor, who once told her--in a moment when she was down--"Don't care, Jöelle. You're great. Play your shit!"
The words come out in a rush.
"This is a bible," she says, speaking of Taylor's advice. "Be you. Be you. We need time. It's a process of life, it's a work in progress. So improvisation for me is not a big stuff. It's just a ...natural food. When you take your instrument, your object, your tool, it's a kind of expression, to express some things--what we are. We are human beings, we are in this world. Not just he or she is a fantastic player--it's the mind! Play who you are. And you can play some fantasy or different style of music, but play who you are, in this world. I'm also a political woman because, I don't know, I'm against a lot of shit. After a lot of studies, or who pushes you to be curious and to read a book, a poetry book, or listen jazz, or listen folk music, or listen la Callas, and have this kind of cause mixed up. But continue your canvas of life with your tool. My tool is the bass. So, nobody pushed me to go in another way. It's maybe because I'm angry. I'm think I'm a bass player angry about a lot of injustice in this world, and they push me to continue to stand up," Léandre concludes.
"We are there to talk about that. If we don't have this conscience, it's bizarre for me."
For Léandre, living life means living it creatively, ready to drop everything and take off for the next adventure. This attitude has informed her life, and it has led her around the world on adventures with some great spirits.
"You can play in Africa, you can go in India, you can meet a guy on the street who says, 'Hey Jöelle, I would like to go and play with you with a tuba and two basses and maybe a dancer.' Yeah! Go! I'm ready. I'm ready on the creative way. And this, I don't know how and when it comes. I was the same at nineteen, twenty years old. I was in America very young, in Buffalo. I was more in the new music scene in this time. I think life is a pure adventure, and this, the book, is a result, because it's a love story. People call up and say, 'Hi Jöelle, we have a gig" or two gigs, in a small village in Austria. And you make fourteen hours--and fourteen hours--twenty-eight hours, to play one hour. You don't think it's a love story?"
I can say that it was a privilege to spend some time with Jöelle Léandre. I can also say that Francesco Martinelli's book is the next best thing to meeting her in person.
Grazie, Francesco.
Merci, Jöelle.
Jöelle Léandre: Discography by Francesco Martinelli
Bandecchi & Vivaldi Editore
ISBN 88-8341-015-7
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