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"The Rural Life"
The blue sky was beginning to darken, suffocated by the fumes vomited by the factories' towers, recently erected as a testament to the explosive and unstoppable power of progress. The purity of the air would be the first to go, followed by the dense greenness of the woods, the crystalline reflection of the untainted streams, and the profound silence of the fields, once interrupted only by the persistent song of the crickets. Industrial capitalism had completed its ascent, catapulting the most greedy entrepreneurs to the top of a grotesque food chain, at the bottom of which crawled and wheezed the children born into the poorest classes, forced to die suffocated in the coal mines or to be mutilated by the gears of mechanical looms.
In this rosy scenario of wonderful evolution, an artistic trend of protest developed in France, which, rejecting the ideal canons imposed by classical art, aimed to show the raw reality for what it truly was, provoking the shock and indignation of the sophisticated bourgeois lords, anesthetized by the luxury and comforts of industrialized Paris. Among the major exponents of the realist movement is still wrongly listed the academic painter William Bouguereau, who, despite living through the two revolutions, always preferred to portray a bucolic world free from the perverse claws of the economy, in which the only trace of so-called realism can be found in the photographic representation of the serene face and embarrassed smile of carefree little girls, often protagonists of his paintings, playing in the countryside and immersing themselves in the green of fields, not yet within reach of the ravenous jaws of the demons that infested the cities with disease, exploitation, and poverty.
Many decades later, still in France, Patrick Forgas, a jazz-style drummer artistically nurtured by the repeated listening to the early Soft Machine, acting exactly contrary to William, dedicated a series of works to that historical period that was so "flourishing" and productive, particularly focusing on one of the most representative monuments of the era: the " Grande Roue" of Paris, conceived at the 1900 World's Fair and demolished twenty years later to meet the enormous need for metal necessary for the reconstruction of places left destroyed during the First World War.
Ironically, despite the completely opposite intentions, the third album of this series, although wanting to continue the discourse started in 1997 with the vigorous electric jazz, revolving around sax and guitar, of "Roue Libre" and continued in '99 with the swirling winds and keyboards of "Extra-Lucide", ends up markedly diverging from its impetuous older siblings, offering sweet and velvety progressive jazz, with a calm and romantic personality and an enviable evocative power, which, without even trying, strongly recalls the enchanted atmospheres oozing from the splendid canvases of Master Bouguereau, who had passed exactly a century before the release of this "Soleil 12", live of class 2005 and predecessor of that "Axe du Fou", published this year, which continues to explore the extraordinary properties of the solo violin, albeit with an almost completely renewed lineup.
It is thus the bow of Frédéric Nore that, waved like a magic wand, opens a path through idyllic realities where the violin and winds describe fantastic flights above the clouds, dispelled by the sunny dances of Stanislas De Nussac's saxophone ("Soleil 12"), which, unfolding between laudatory soliloquies of keyboard, alto sax, and drums, invents enchanted scenographies in constant change, in which the whimsical and jovial sounds of the ensemble initially enjoy impersonating caressing and languid whispers, only to then transform into overwhelming assaults, emphasized by the relentless rhythm of Kengo Mochizuki's bass ("Pievre à la Pluie"). Keyboardist Igor Brover, for his part, lays melodic carpets of a candid sacred aura, on which gently rests the ever-present and elegant violin, which, in contact with the stormy drums of Patrick, begins to swirl vortex-like ("Éclipse"), leaving Denis Guivarch's alto sax and Sylvain Gontard's trumpet to play outdoors, picking daisies and exchanging garlands of flowers, always under the watchful eye of Sylvain Ducloux's gentle guitar arpeggios, who, when the time is right, decides to support his companions more energetically, reuniting them with the other instruments and carrying this mammoth composition (35 min.) to its intricate and iridescent conclusion ("Coup de Théâtre").
Curiously, just as happened with the genius William, Patrick is still placed among the cornerstones of a genre that, in reality, only partially belongs to him, thus generating a certain confusion around the music proposed by his "Band Phenomena". The truth is that the Canterbury Sound of which he has been made an emblem and which even earned him the unjustifiably exaggerated nickname of "the French Robert Wyatt", influences his compositions to a rather modest extent, if not perhaps for the distant solo debut "Cocktail" of 1977, where the Wyattian echoes are essentially concentrated in a brazenly derivative vocal style, which nonetheless fails to elevate the work to the level of the major English figures, superior in every aspect and enriched by that irreproducible humor, characteristic of the charming inhabitants of the Kent lands.
Therefore, if it is true that, as Bouguereau used to tell his students, "one must always seek beauty and truth...", I believe it is advisable to leave behind the not too convincing solo career of a drummer recently emigrated to the rhythmically poor territories of ambient ("Synchronicité", 2002) and instead focus on the extremely more personal, refreshing and engaging jazz prog of his band, which, since its inception, has been producing brilliant performances, each better than the last.
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