La chanson at the court of
His Majesty Jazz: Claude Nougaro

At the intersection between the classic triad of Brassens / Brel / Ferré and Gainsbourg post-modernity, with the sheer force of arms, as a miner, has run the place dug Claude Nougaro.

Claude Nougaro was born in Toulouse in 1929 and died in Paris in 2004. Active on the scene since the early 60s he wrote hundreds of songs, recorded some thirty records and given countless concerts. He combined very well care for poetry, typical of the French classic song, jazz and a general focus on African-American rhythms. Percussionist of the word, a bold experimenter of verbal games, but a lover of folk art (his first goal arrived in the capital, was to work for Edith Piaf) chose the difficult path to continue experimenting with sounds and arrangements, while remaining faithful in a precise and recognizable style of writing. Its main themes are existential and emotional, but his interest in world music has made him look sensitive to situations of extreme poverty and pain from which that music came from.

This village is a large house, called bin
bin, trash can, live in slums is only one
girls with soft skin sell it to eat
in the rooms there are animals that to sleep you have to move
children play but the ball is a tin of sardines, Bi-don.
Give me your hand, comrade
you who come from countries where being human is beautiful
give me your hand mate
I have five fingers, too, we would look the same.
(Bidonville, 1965)

His life was not rosy, childhood was lonely, cared for by grandparents in the popular district of Toulouse. The loneliness led him to poetry and poetry led him first to say his lyrics rather than singing them. His career - playing in a minor key, with a long apprenticeship - was often on the verge of breaking. At the beginning (1963) for a scary car crash that pinned him for almost a year

My destiny has a new face
from the day I turned evil
I closed my eyes to a stone wall
to open them up to nurse.
(Pauvre Nougaro, 1963)

Another time at the refusal of his own record label: after decades of success in the face of declining sales in the early '80s, they canceled the contract. Nougaro, combative and vital as ever, sold the house in Paris and went to New York, where he produced the album that relaunched him in 1987, topped the charts and into the final consecration.
Celebrated and followed by numerous public, Nougaro died writing and recording until his last breath, leaving behind an unfinished album and the impression of an artist still full of things to say. One of the giants of the extraordinary generation of writers and performers who made the history of the song, maybe that, more than any other, has tried to talk about the song at this time.
Georges Brassens was a great minstrel, his rhymes are libertarian medieval tales, his language is refined beyond history, the melodies are so catchy that seem to have always existed. Jacques Brel, another giant, has committed to paste the entire body to the verb, to make you sweat every word, to find a theatrical gesture for each melody. Ferré is an artist who communicates with titanic Rimbaud and Beethoven and, dizzying heights, throwing darts on small and great dictators of his time. Gainsbourg has already slipped too far the other hand, does not harbor more interest in the content, its charge of dynamite in his criticism of music and words, the square in the very language of the song (which basically hates, as a genre less). His challenge has no confidence ... no palingenesis is expected: only the aesthetics of ruins. No love consoles him: just exhausted sensuality.
In this Olympus French lyrics, the intersection between the classic triad of Brassens / Brel / Ferré and Gainsbourg post-modernity, with the sheer force of arms, like a miner, has run the place dug Claude Nougaro.
Nougaro is the modern bard, Nougaro renews worries about speech and language to grant the hourglasses of Brassens cuckoo clock of Brel and the pulse of quartz watches.
To do this he renewed the form, playing this revival - not only in terms of vocabulary - on rhythm and succeeded in the difficult task of adhering to the language of Voltaire, with all its nuances, richness, puns, metaphors, visionary, consistency literary, jazz ... well to quote the author, to His Majesty the Jazz!
Jazz is for Nougaro the first rebellion and the first adolescent disturbance that comes with the release in the mid 40s. It is the sound which is opposed to the tastes of parents, both professional musicians: the father famous baritone, his mother a pianist and music teacher abhorred what he called the "bear dance. "
Claude's childhood was a bit 'tossed on tour in the wake of the parents and long boring waits at grandparents' house in the popular district Minimes in his hometown, recalled years later in a beautiful song

How far my country ...
sometimes at the end of me comes to life
the green waters of the Canal du Midi
and the red brick of the Minimes
Oh my country, oh ... oh Toulouse Toulouse.
I take the way to school
my portfolio is brimming with fists in the face (...)
A stream of pebbles rolling in your accent
your violence simmers even in your violets
There is to be assholes, just one question. (...)

I see your pavers, my Gascon city
your sidewalk ripped from gas pipes
Spain will push you in the side horns
or do you keep a bubble in the bowels of jazz?
Here is your Capitol ... and here I stop
cooled tenors trembled under the windy
I can still hear the echo of the voice of Dad
in those days was my only blues singer (...)
(Toulouse, 1967)

Brassens, Brel and Ferre, aware of the specificities of the song, rise it in literary form, oral poetry. Their art ignores one of the key languages of the '900, the cinema, the three sacred cows would be cast in the same way if the film had not existed. For Nougaro instead it is essential.
Nougaro completes its renovation for the song using a highly cinematic language. His words evoke a kaleidoscope of images, constantly put in motion by the music that accompanies them. A game of continuous fields and reverse moves his lyrics.

The neon sign at the entrance of the closet
illuminating the dark room
a red glow
as night falls
and in this red room
there is a big black guy
a girl with red
in a black silk dress.
(Le rouge et le noir, 1962)

The imagery of these songs constantly fishing from Hollywood gangster mythology, boxer, Alcatraz and Sing Sing, but these references are only the most visible side of a style entirely of floor-sequence and subjective, fittings and fading.

What is the movie, the scene,
you have to repeat again
and in which nothing now lights
the neon in your name, Marilyn?

How hard the heart
if you preferred the beyond
blue water of the pool, Marilyn?

Talent weight in gold
and beauty in technicolor
and the California sun
nothing is useless
if you look behind the scenery.

Turns bad, turn awry
dreams, happiness and love
hope as an old tabloid
slipped between your fingers, Marilyn?

Our life is just a test ...
for whom, why? God only knows
you know the end of the film
Marylin tell me, is with a kiss?

(Chanson pour Marilyn, 1963)

But in the end all the worries of Nougaro - though expressed in language and references of its own and our time - focuse on the eternal themes: life and death, transcendence, loneliness, hope, despair. This is the element of continuity that keeps him tied to a poetic tradition. Fierce defender of his absolute independence of mind, Nougaro eschews any notion of political commitment with any organized group, but it expresses very well the demands of inner revolution in a song dedicated to the riots of May '68.
On one wild weave rhythmic percussion Nougaro recites the text, which forty years later as the generation of black rappers like to be taken in 2008 by Abd Al Malik ... and I think this tells us that the good bridge between the poem is from Nougaro modernity is still standing.

The helmet does not move the paving of an eye
Senna once again the holy water runoff
the wind has scattered the ashes of Bendit
and everyone has come home in his car.
I found the step on the hairless asphalt
the passage of a bird in a cage with feathers Tarpaulins
digging the escape of a nightingale Titan
to make sure the Rite of Spring.
These days, however, my throat is a bit harsh
The Rite of Spring sounds like a massacre
but every day will be the most beautiful cry
perhaps because a den Igor Stravinski
May, May, May, Paris in May.

And I'll take Paris, with his arms full of zeal
on my chest I hold your stones
I lay on the northern Tuileries
like a rose on the bed of a young lady.
Overflight your lunch six million types
your life to the brim fills me with tripe
swallow your neighborhoods pigeon color
gray intelligence and white religion.
I can see, going, Hugo in the Sorbonne
the smell of water lives of old confetti
the edge of the evening, between the holy and the tramp
I dive into a bridge on which he is a student
May, May, May, Paris in May.

The boy tore his hair worn
the boy indignantly tore his clothes
"comrades, my skin is also a uniform?
and inside my own heart, is an old tool?
when with my lovely friend dance together
we who dance and is the world trembles?
I do not for biting the hand that feeds
but just to know if the man is right or not
if I still have to wear this uniform close
with his right sleeve with his left sleeve
the pale prayers, bloody hymns
passion for the future, the chronic amnesia "
May, May, May, Paris in May.

Thus spoke the boy without a word
between the old river and the new river
where men surf in the drowned car
so without a word spoke the boy.
And I, bird cage, love crunching crust
to my inner sky I went down into the street
along the tunnel walls, dripping on the back of
fund to be drawn into a puff of blue
there shines the peace, at the poles
and the sword of the spring that consecrates the shoulders
chirping of birds to lift the day
and the rest of us screeching, drawbridges love.
(Paris mai, 1969).

Alessio Lega
alessio.lega@fastwebnet.it