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Priceless Nostalgia for a Primitive Future
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RootsWorld Bulletin #380, Priceless Nostalgia for a Primitive Future >>
Marty Lipp talks with Dominic Cravic about Les Primitifs du Futur
Can you be nostalgic for a place you've never
been? On January 21, the 2007 edition of
Globalfest takes place at Webster Hall in New
York City, and will host several bands that
recreate times and places that few if anyone in
these parts ever experienced. In fact, the
musicians themselves were never there. Still,
they conjure up a spell strong enough to create a
place you'd really want to be.
One of the featured bands is Les Primitifs du
Futur, led by guitarist Dominic Cravic. Cravic is
a French musician who was playing jazz and rock
in the 1980s, but also loved bal-musette, a style
born in poor Parisian districts in the 1880s. It
then spread to the upper classes through the
early 20th century. At first, the bourgeousie
would go to bal-musette dancehalls as a kind of
"slumming," which the proprietors sometimes
indulged by staging mock police raids. The
musette dancehalls swung to a variety of partner
dances - waltzes, tangos, fox trots, as well as
the risque hands-on-butts java style.
The older music, Cravic said, was from an era
before big media and industrialization. "It has a
perfume of a homemade music played for dance for
ordinary people and some high-society members who
liked to hang out with the 'milieu' [in the
dancehalls], the hoodlums, pimps, et cetera."
"It's sure that something has been lost," Cravid
added, "but no one can tell if things can
reappear again. I always give the example of
Manouche or Gypsy style á la Django Reinhardt:
fifteen years ago, you could count the Manouche
guitar players on both hands - some genuine old
guys playing in some little cafes at the flea
market and a few gadges [standard French
guitarists who loved the music]. Today, it's a
huge worldwide craze with a lot of festivals,
clubs, an enormous production of albums of Gypsy music."
In the 1960s, he said, "we had the arrival of our
French version of pop rock 'n' roll: what they
called Les Yeh Yeh. The musette style, like many
other styles, was considered corny - oldie but
not goodie - and was swept away. Added to that,
accordion players - to resist the flood - started
to play really corny. It took 25 years before
audiences turned their ears again to what could
be considered their own roots. And accordion is
back again in the different French fields of music, even in rap or hiphop."
In 1985, he met a fellow nostalgist in Robert
Crumb, the iconic American underground cartoonist
who created the ubiquitous "Keep on Truckin'"
poster and the character Mr. Natural. Crumb, who
played mandolin and banjo, was a longtime fan of old jazz and blues.
Crumb and Cravic hunted down old 78s and found
like-minded musicians to create Les Primitifs du
Futur. They released an EP in 1986, then a
full-length album in 1995. Now their 2000 album,
World Musette, is being reissued in North America.
"We like to play some songs close to the way they
were played, to keep that tradition alive and we
love that sound," Cravic said, "but what we
prefer is writing new songs with a personal
approach. It's like traveling through time. We
love to create songs that present meetings of
different cultures: an accordion player from
Auvergne in the center of France playing along an
Algerian oud player [as in] the song that gave
its title to World Musette. Anyway, we think that
there is more in common with the different musics
of the world than differences."
The Primitifs are reverent without being too
serious, swinging but always lovely; even Fay
Lovsky's playing of the musical saw is hauntingly
pretty despite its being a touch absurd, which
might be a pretty good description of the band as a whole.
- by Marty Lipp
Listen to "Kid Chocolat"
http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/primitifs.ram
Read our original CD review:
http://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/worldmusette.html
12/22/06
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