Ghédalia Tazartès
Diasporas / Tazartès

Dedicated to Nicola di Bari, to Il_Paolo and to all migrants.

"Where was music before music halls? Where was the voice before it learned how to speak?"
(Commentary by André Glucksmann on the backcover of Diasporas / Tazartès)

    Many treasures are known to all and displayed to the public inside museums, but surely there are others, like sunk in the ocean, whose memory has been lost over time and which we may never be able to admire again. One of these treasures is called Enzo Del Re and lives right in the small coastal town where I moved with my girlfriend about three years ago. Since his recordings are almost impossible to find, often, when I've gone to the fish market to buy two scorpion fish and some scampi for soup, I've thought about approaching this bearded and mythological elder always quarreling with some fisherman, but my great shyness and especially his character -from what little I could timidly observe from a safe distance- incredibly grumpy, have always prevented me. It is, therefore, with a kind of resentful regret that I have decided to briefly talk about him and his awful character on this page dedicated instead to the more distant, but certainly more approachable, Ghédalia Tazartès. 

    Of course, it must be said, even managing to approach the Frenchman of Turkish descent is not an easy task at first. Gifted with a voice capable of effortlessly covering four octaves, which to call versatile would be an understatement, Tazartès gives the impression of being a Zelig wandering the world, so much so that, at first listen, one might almost have the sensation of holding in their hands one of the craziest collections of world music, whose singers are, from time to time, children, drunks, women, elderly and angels from all places on earth. The journey is, moreover, a fundamental theme of all his works and it is to be believed that after "Jeannie" (a musical composition for the play of the same name based on a novel by Nicolas Genka and sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture) it will return obsessively to being so.

    The record I propose to you, while collecting what was in 1975 his debut ("Diasporas") and his fourth work of 1981 ("Tazartès"), appears incredibly organic from a formal point of view. As you may have understood from the description of this artist's extraordinary abilities, we find ourselves mostly in the dark and strangely dense territory of vocal experimentation which, in the case of Tazartès, is never an end in itself. This is already demonstrated in the lacerating first nine minutes in which over a loop of violins - where on occasion percussion is inserted which has more of a coloring than rhythmic function - we hear Tazartès first singing in full voice and then choking beyond human limits to tell us the disastrous tale of "un amour si grand qu'il nie son objet". Like the wandering Jew who resorts to a thousand disguises, so Tazartès is capable of using all timbres to confront the themes of absence, uprooting, and death: in "La vie et la mort légendaries du spermatozoide Humuck Lardy" the Frenchman becomes an old Japanese Noh theatre actor grappling with a funeral lament and, unexpectedly, in "Quasimodo Tango", the only "song" on the album (written in collaboration with Michel Chion), a poignant chansonnier accompanied by piano, harmonica, and xylophone. With the ninth track, we truly understand the meaning of what Glucksmann writes ("where could the child of the century be found before he is forced to song using slogans, passwords or pretentious ideologies?"): learning the language during growth means precisely "mourir un peu". This is why those splendid children's voices gradually give way to a structured symphonic orchestration.

    The eight tracks that make up "Tazartès", while perhaps exhibiting even greater sophistication in sound research, do not deviate much from the previous ones. Predominant here is the presence of the great music of the African continent (including that of Fela Kuti, if we think of the Nigerian funk with which "Merci Stéphane" closes) and evident, on the part of Ghédalia Tazartès, is the desire to get closer to the song form (a sign of the new course that will lead him to later produce works like "Voyage à l’ombre"). Over the years this great author will create works that are certainly more accessible (and always of the highest value), however, "Diasporas / Tazartès" remains, in my opinion, the most memorable: the work of an incredibly cultured European musician capable of reconciling us with a naive and almost prenatal dimension of man more than an Aboriginal today who has at least once in his life listened to the Ramones could.