The Human Seasons is an album of musical and sound improvisation between the Argentinian pianist Gustavo Beytelmann and DJ producer Philippe Cohen Solal. Title of a famous poem by John Keats and metaphor for the four seasons of our existence, it is also about the life we improvise day by day.
Here, acoustics and electronics dialogue in a unique musical ping-pong. The 2 musicians meet over the human seasons, between “field recording” and “spoken word”, to deliver an instrumental performance that is sometimes serene, sometimes powerful.
The computer breakdown is the obsession of the musicians of the electronic universe. From one of them, which occurred on a summer evening in 2006 during a Gotan Project concert, was born one of the most singular and innovative records of the current musical landscape: The Human Seasonsan exercise in improvisation between the piano of Gustavo Beytelmann and the palette of sounds of DJ producer Philippe Cohen Solal.
Both were on stage that evening, in Caserta, near Naples, at the Belvedere of San Leucio, a palace where a pioneering experiment in utopian socialism was carried out in the 18th century. When the sound stopped, “it was panic, recalls Gustavo Beytelmann, the Argentinian pianist linked, in the studio and on stage, to the tango-electro-dub group. A famous word from Jean Cocteau sums up the situation: “Since these mysteries are beyond us, let us pretend to be their organizers. Gustavo joins his piano and, while waiting for the repair, launches into an improvisation. Philippe Cohen Solal, on the decks, picks up the ball and adds sounds, feeling.
The computers finally come to their senses and the program resumes. The musicians breathe, they had a narrow escape. And the public knew nothing of the incident: they perceived the interlude as part of the spectacle.
“It was unexpected and quite magical”, says Philippe today. “And we had the intuition that we could go further on this path”. Gotan Project will take up, moreover, from time to time, in concert, the principle of the double piano-turntable improvisation.
More than ten years pass. One morning, Philippe Cohen Solal listens on France Culture The Paths of Philosophy. Adèle Van Reeth’s show is devoted to improvisation. Memories of Caserta come back. And with them the desire to play again, under the same conditions, but in the studio. July 2021, the two accomplices meet in Villetaneuse, near Paris, in the former Vogue studio.
“All improvisation involves endangerment”, explains the producer. “To start from a stable base all the same, I thought of the cycle of the seasons, and of this poem by John Keats which associates them with human life. It’s a classic theme, almost banal, but which seemed relevant to our project. : we all improvise our lives”.
Before embarking on the adventure, Philippe Cohen Solal chooses sounds of nature, birdsong, excerpts from film dialogues. And asks English comedian Christopher Ettridge to record Tea Human Seasons, short poem by John Keats. Who has not known many seasons: he died young, of tuberculosis, just 200 years ago.
“We did not theorize before entering the studio”, says Gustavo Beytelmann, the wise old Argentinian, Parisian by adoption since 1978. “We left without a fixed roadmap. The 45 minutes of the disc are free of piano rhetoric. And virtuosity too : this project did not require to show its muscles”. Philippe Cohen-Solal adds: “The only indication I gave Gustavo was to think about the seasons, echoing his experience, his memories.”
If the complicity between the two musicians was born in Gotan Project, the music of Buenos Aires is absent from Tea Human Seasons. “It wasn’t in the specifications. notes Philip. “No more than jazz, another universe familiar to Gustavo. Neither he nor I recycled anything, we left the registers for which we are known”.
Spring opens the cycle with birdsong, the piano takes off associated with the musicality of Keats’s verses, before the violins, in the form of a sample, intervene, echo of a ball whose memory resurfaces Unexpectedly. summer evokes Latinity: it is a habanera which drifts while dancing towards Cuba, punctuated by what one would swear to be a güiro, this calabash of the Caribbean streaked and scraped with a stick. Mistake, reveals Philippe Cohen Solal: it’s still a bird song, melted to the chirping of a cricket. The sensuality of a dialogue in Italian, the murmur of the waves, the percussion of a woodpecker on a tree trunk: the birds definitely have the upper hand. Autumn comes with the rain, each drop like a piano note. A woman speaks to us in an unknown language: it is the Swedish voice of Ingrid Bergman in Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman. Winter comes with its rigor, the breath of the icy wind, then a weightless atmosphere and the fire crackling in the fireplace. Last verse of Keats, which the English call “the poet of slowness and silence”. He died in winter.
It takes a moment to emerge from this meditation on life, its pleasures and its pains. The harmony that emerges from the whole does not refer to the most commonly accepted idea of improvisation. We are far from the jam sessions of jazzmen, with their raw energy. Tea Human Seasons is the opposite, carried by a serene energy, without dissonances. Gustavo Beytelmann claims it: “I entered the studio with the idea that it was forbidden to be non-melodious, because we live inside a world that sings.”
Biographies of the artists
Gustavo Beytelman, pianist and composer, is a major figure in Argentine tango. His career as a musician and composer is a sum of brilliant pages. He worked with Astor Piazzolla, Juan José Mosalini, he accompanied the group Gotan Project on several tours, and, still very young, he was chosen to accompany Duke Ellington’s Argentinian tour.
G. Beytelmann has composed pieces for the cinema, numerous tango works, and since 1996 he has directed the Tango section of the Rotterdam Conservatory, in the Netherlands.
For more than three decades now, Philippe Cohen Solal made his mark as an electronic music architect and self-taught composer, having worked in many different areas of music production: from A&R and film scores, to DJing and record making.
He discovered Keziah Jones and introduced Zazie to Mercury, before founding his own label Ya Basta Records in 1996, where he would sign Féloche and David Walters.
He co-founded Gotan Project, an ambitious balance between electronic music and tango. The band have sold over four million copies to date worldwide and have played over 450 concerts from Rio to New York, Montreux and Tokyo, not to mention some of the most prestigious venues in the world.
Philippe also produced Talé, album of the golden voice of Africa, Salif Keita, and collaborated with various artists such as Angelique Kidjo, Keziah Jones, Horace Andy, Chassol, Adrien Brody, Roberto Fonseca, Laurent Voulzy, Camelia Jordana.. .
His penultimate opus Outsiderinspired by the American raw artist Henry Darger was recorded between London and LA, with partners of choice: Mike Lindsay (Tunng), Hannah Peel and Adam Glover.
This trans-media project (short film, podcasts, videos, etc.) has been celebrated by the international press and will be the subject of a show in 2022.
Performed titles
– Winter, Live RFI
– Fall, excerpt from the album The Human Seasons
– Summer, Live RFI
Musicians
-Gustavo Beytelmannpiano
– Philippe Cohen Solalmachinery, computer
His
Benoit Letirant and Mathias Taylor
playlist
– Horacio Salgan Orquesta A Fuego Lento chosen by Gustavo
– Veronika Silva Dona Ubenza chosen by Philip
-Charlie Mingus Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (theme for Lester Young) chosen by Gustavo
– Cristobal Tapia de Veer Pineapple Suite chosen by Philip.
(Rebroadcast March 6, 2022)