On the relevance of recording and memory

I have faith in memory. Like Duke Ellington, I believe that a musician needs the capacity for recollection I order to play, to create. It doesn’t matter what style, what idiom he chooses for this: the memory the musician uses to trigger off his artistic process appears to be of crucial importance for the relevance and profundity of what he has to say. Memory serves as a driving force for the artistic act, it gives a meaning to the musical gesture, and situates the artist within his personal history and his own creative necessity. For this reason, I feel as much admiration for Baroque musicians, positively intoxicated with memory, as for DJs who sample and manipulate the patrimony of other people’s memory, not forgetting the traditional musician, who reinvents his repertory each time, drawing on a primordial tradition without constraints and, paradoxically, without historical memory. Yet all of these, in their own manner, express the strength and necessity of the meaning, the concept, the inevitable project which underpins the act of making music. 

Form needs content, and nowadays more than ever, in an artistic landscape saturated with information and a considerably weakened cultural economy. In this respect, the utilisation of patrimonial and historical memory as a vector of meaning and musical concept does not seem to me entirely satisfactory. On the other hand, the search for a more universal emotional connection, a sublime, lyrical imaginative world, with an intimate personal memory as its starting point, represents for me the ultimate aim of every musical undertaking. I believe that this memory, this intimate recollection that I wish to share with the present recording of the ‘Newtopia Project’, expresses a broader, more inclusive reality, which anyone can experience as the symbol of a life cycle. It therefore gives a clear direction to the musical utopia that presided over the creation of the ‘Newtopia Project’, which assembles a group of musicians in the service of a generous, universal conception of music.
Suite Élégiaque
In my own case, then, this memory expresses our relationship with death and mourning, a vast subject that must inevitably be dealt with by any music of a spiritual, liturgical, or ritual character.

After several years spent in the historical exploration of the spiritual domain in improvised musics, notably with Compagnie Nine Spirit which I have directed since 1999, I now feel the need for a more personal investment in this subject, as both composer and improviser. Although my religious belief is not strong enough for me to go so far as to write a mass or any other strictly liturgical music, I nevertheless feel I have reached a moment in my musical evolution where I can turn to a more inward, more spiritual inspiration. In this perspective, the need to describe the power and the importance of music in a cathartic process of mourning is one particularly close to my heart. 
Thus the Suite Élégiaque, written in 2004, invokes the memory of people who left us before their time, our relationship with the places, events and people who made us what we are, our relationship with the past and our quest for the future. It expresses our need for memory in order to construct ourselves, while at the same time defending our doubts and questionings as constituting elements of personal edification. This Suite Élégiaque also tries, avoiding all morbidity, to express the hope of renewal, the necessary rebirth of the spirit afflicted by mourning, the strength of music as a regenerative power.
 
The Suite Élégiaque is divided into four parts:

·       Ouverture which begins like an explosion of light, for I was soon confronted with the paradox of using light as an illustration of what death can represent, and how it can be represented without torment.
·       Les Ancêtres (The ancestors), a recollection of those who went before us, but also of a subject so dear to most of the composers and musicians who have taken even the slightest interest in the spiritual element in music.
·       Regard face à la lumière (Looking towards the light): an attempt to describe that last, intense gaze that moves over to the other side, serene and joyously illuminated.
·       Éternité douce/amère (Bittersweet eternity): a challenge for the composer – to try to convey in music the notion of eternity, infinity. 
 

Newtopia Project
Music, and most especially the field of improvised music, is all a question of encounters. In this case, in meeting Yaron, Zim, Stephan, Simon, and Cedrick, I consider myself to have been particularly fortunate. Can one imagine a finer environment for this musical ambition and this particular message? Zim Ngqawana is in my view one of the leading international saxophonists and a highly unconventional composer. I first met him at the premiere of our Compagnie Nine Spirit’s new work dedicated to Amadou Hampatê Ba at the Banlieues Bleues festival in 2004. The desire to play together was immediate and irremediable! Yaron Herman is a prodigious talent, a brother in music and humanity, an alchemist of improvisation, totally committed and original. As for Stephan Caracci, Simon Tailleu and Cedrick Bec, whom I got to know as students while I was teaching in the jazz class of the Marseille Conservatoire (directed by Philippe Renault), they offer an edifying illustration of the phenomenal dynamic of the new Marseille scene with its exceptional open-mindedness and versatility. Moreover, they all have something original and personal to say on the specific subject of the spiritual in music and memory.

This ensemble forms an explosive, exciting tool, a collective of personalities sharing the same passion for lyricism and spontaneous dialogue, the same rigorous melodic frenzy, the same faith in a creative musical invention rising far above aesthetic barriers. Born from the magic of these amazing encounters, Newtopia Project defends the idea that improvised music inspires a unique dialogue between cultures and individuals. Newtopia Project demonstrates its attachment to a certain musical ‘utopia’, its name chosen to signify both the spirit of novelty and originality and the search for a possible bridge between memory, the dream world, and the creative imagination.
The Newtopia Project win the 28th national Jazz competition of La Défense 2005.

Raphaël Imbert