Gustavo Beytelmann & Philippe Cohen Solal - The Human Seasons

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: YAB101
Barcode: 3760300319772
Release Date: 26 Aug 2022
Genre: Jazz

TRACKLIST:
1. Autumn (11:00)
2. Spring (08:19)
3. Summer (13:46)
4. Winter (11:40)

The Gotan Project members propose a new album between classical and modern electronic music.

The computer breakdown is the obsession of the musicians of the electronic universe. From one of them, which occurred on a summer evening in 2006 during a Gotan Project concert, was born one of the most unique and innovative records in the current musical landscape: The Human Seasons, an exercise in improvisation between Gustavo Beytelmann's piano and DJ producer Philippe Cohen Solal's palette of sounds.

Both were on stage that evening, in Caserta, near Naples, at the Belvedere of San Leucio, a palace where a pioneering experiment in utopian socialism was carried out in the 18th century. When the sound stopped, "it was panic", recalls Gustavo Beytelmann, the Argentine pianist linked, in the studio as on stage, to the tango-electro-dub group. A famous saying by Jean Cocteau sums up the situation: “Since these mysteries are beyond us, let us pretend to be their organizers”. Gustavo joins his piano and, while waiting for the repair, launches into an improvisation. Philippe Cohen Solal, on the decks, picks up the ball and adds sounds, feeling. The computers finally come to their senses and the program resumes. The musicians breathe, they had a narrow escape. And the audience knew nothing of the incident: they perceived the interlude as part of the show.

“It was unexpected and quite magical, says Philippe today. And we had the intuition that we could go further on this path”. Gotan Project will take up, moreover, from time to time, in concert, the principle of the double piano-turntable improvisation.

More than ten years pass. One morning, Philippe Cohen Solal listens to Les Chemins de la Philosophie on France Culture. Adèle Van Reeth's show is devoted to improvisation. Memories of Caserta come back. And with them the desire to play again, under the same conditions, but in the studio. July 2021, the two accomplices meet in Villetaneuse, near Paris, in the former Vogue studio.

“Any improvisation involves endangerment,” explains the producer. To start from a stable base all the same, I thought of the cycle of the seasons, and of this poem by John Keats which associates them with human life. It's a classic theme, almost banal, but which seemed relevant to our project: we all improvise our lives”.

Before embarking on the adventure, Philippe Cohen Solal chooses sounds of nature, birdsong, excerpts from film dialogues. And asks the English actor Christopher Ettridge to record The Human Seasons, the brief poem by John Keats. Who has not known many seasons: he died young, of tuberculosis, just 200 years ago.

“We didn't theorize before entering the studio, says Gustavo Beytelmann, the wise old Argentinian, Parisian by adoption since 1978. We left without a fixed roadmap beforehand. The 45 minutes of the disc are free of piano rhetoric. And virtuosity too: this project did not require showing your muscles”. Philippe Cohen-Solal adds: “The only indication I gave Gustavo was to think of the seasons as an echo of his experience, his memories”.

If the complicity between the two musicians was born in Gotan Project, the music of Buenos Aires is absent from The Human Seasons. “It was not in the specifications, notes Philippe. No more than jazz, another universe familiar to Gustavo. Neither he nor I recycled anything, we left the registers for which we are known”.

Le Printemps opens the cycle with birdsong, the piano takes flight associated with the musicality of Keats' verses, before the violins, in the form of a sample, intervene, echoing a ball whose memory reappears unexpectedly. Summer evokes Latinity: it's a habanera that drifts dancing towards Cuba, punctuated by what one would swear to be a güiro, this ribbed Caribbean calabash scraped with a stick. Mistake, reveals Philippe Cohen Solal: it's still a bird song, melted to the chirping of a cricket. The sensuality of a dialogue in Italian, the murmur of the waves, the percussion of a woodpecker on a tree trunk: the birds definitely have the upper hand. Autumn comes with rain, each drop like a piano note. A woman speaks to us in an unknown language: it is the Swedish voice of Ingrid Bergman in Sonata d'Automne by Ingmar Bergman. Winter comes with its rigor, the breath of the icy wind, then a weightless atmosphere and the fire crackling in the fireplace. Last verse of Keats, whom the English call "the poet of slowness and silence". He died in winter.

It takes a moment to emerge from this meditation on life, its pleasures and its pains. The harmony that emerges from the whole does not refer to the most commonly accepted idea of improvisation. We are far from the jam sessions of jazzmen, with their raw energy. The Human Seasons is the opposite, carried by a serene energy, without dissonances. Gustavo Beytelmann claims it: "I entered the studio with the idea that it was forbidden to be non-melodious, because we live inside a world that sings”.

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