Over the years I have been playing the trump, or rather living with the coupling it forms with the mouth cavity, the instrument has become more and more a sort of oracle – not that it foretells the future, but it helps to resolve many fundamental musical problems. To any question, it doesn’t so much give a clear-cut answer but like any self-respecting oracle, it throws the question back couched in different terms. With the question transformed, it’s almost as if it became someone else’s problem and you have probably noticed that other people’s problems are easier to solve than your own... Preparing this CD did take me down some unusual and untrodden musical byways, and the result is a very personal expression.
From the start, I was hemmed in by two bêtes noires named “Intellectualism” and “phoney Mys- ticism”. And to keep my feet more or less on the ground, I tried to keep to a definite framework by revisiting an improvisation that I put on my first LP “La Guimbarde” (1971). This piece was called Ram Caram, named after a Gaine boy street singer in Katmandu who had been recorded by Mireille Helffer in the 1960’s. There were two features in this piece – a leitmotiv inspired by the boy’s singing and an exploration of resonances and their combination. It took place as follows – select an initial sound and then listen to what was going on in the background. When another distant sound takes your fancy, go to it and bring it into the foreground replacing the first – and so on with successive sounds and combinations of sound. This gives the impression of taking the sound of the trump for a “walk” round the mouth and the throat, the mouth cavity.
In 1984, at the First Jew’s Harp Congress organised by Fred Crane in Iowa City I developed this idea in a piece entitled “Taking the Jew’s Harp for a Walk” which seemed to go down well. And having lived with the piece a few years more, on receiving a commission to record a set of improvised inven- tions for the Radio France label Ocora, I once again took up the same formula which has served as a jumping-off point for other musical explorations. The latest version is the first on this album.
In spite of the emphasis on sound texture, in all the music I play, melody plays an important role. Three pieces revisit known ancient or traditional tunes, all the others were more or less on the spot improvisations with the aim of exploring and exploiting specific features of the ‘voice’ and the musical potential of the trump.
Some are programmed music, evoking images or events, others afterthoughts developed after listening to initial recordings (here comes a third bête noire – “Romanticism”).
The recording was done at Geneviève Clément’s country house; you can hear the crackling of the wood fire and birds outside. We took our time.
John Wright