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Gotan Project at the Nice Jazz Festival
Tango in the Pine Woods
Nice
31/07/2003 -
As striking performers, technicians and other behind-the-stage workers have disrupted the festival season in France, the Nice Jazz Festival has managed to get its show up and running against all odds. This is largely thanks to the diplomatic skills of its organiser, Viviane Sicnasi, who made enormous efforts to defuse tension and discuss problems with striking workers defending their rights. Sicnasi succeeded where so many other organisers had failed and this year's Nice Jazz Festival not only ran as planned, but assured an excellent musical line-up into the bargain. One of the highlights of this year's crop were Gotan Project, a group whose revolutionary idea of fusing electro dubs with tangos and age-old milongas would have delighted the late great Carlos Gardel himself!
In fact, the ghost of the Argentinian legend was present from the very first chords of the group's set at Nice. Playing at the "Scène des Jardins," Gotan Project had patiently waited until nightfall so that their giant video installations would have maximum effect on the crowd. And the audience was certainly raring to go when the group stepped out from behind a screen and opened their show with Queremos paz (We Want Peace!), the first track on their best-selling debut album, La Revancha del Tango. As the guitar of Argentinian exile Eduardo Makaroff and the haunting chords of Nini Flores's bandoneon rang out on the night air with Philippe Cohen Solal's machines and Christophe H. Müller's synthesisers the audience stood transfixed beneath the pines.
Looking strikingly elegant in crisp shirts and fitted suits, the members of Gotan Project proceeded to launch into a stunning audio-visual performance where images played as great a role as the music. Gotan (their name is slang for tango) started life as a trio based in Paris, forming in 1999 when French musician Philippe Cohen Solal teamed up with Argentinian exile Eduardo Makaroff. The Franco-Argentinian duo soon added another nationality to their bow when they were joined by Swiss synth wizard Christophe H. Müller. The threesome went on to record a debut EP together, which was released on Philippe Cohen Solal's electro label Ya Basta in 2000. Over the years Cohen Solal, Makaroff and Müller have remained the core trio of Gotan, but the group has now expanded its line-up to seven musicians on stage incorporating two new Argentinian members - composer Gustavo Beytelmann on piano and Edi Tomassi on percussion – as well as violinist Line Kruse (a Danish woman married to an Argentinian) and Spanish singer Cristina Vilallonga.
Gotan's infectious electro-tango fusion soon had couples dancing beneath the pine trees in Nice. And their movements were neatly echoed by a close-up of entwined dancers' legs on the giant video screen behind the stage. Throughout the show haunting black-and-white images from the archives recounted the history of Argentina as Gotan moved through their paces on stage, the audience thrilling to lively renditions of a Frank Zappa cover, brilliant versions of the theme music to Last Tango in Paris and Piazzolla's Vuelvo al Sur (the theme music to Argentinian director Fernando Solanas's film Tangos, l'exil de Gardel). Gotan Project's own original compositions proved equally hard-hitting, especially the poignant number about Argentina's economic crisis, El capitalismo foraneo (Foreign Capitalism) featuring sampled extracts of Che Guevara!
Hot back from a successful tour of America, Gotan Project can sit back on their laurels as their experimental fusion sound takes off worldwide – and not just with Hispanic communities either! While the Argentinian community in Miami and Los Angeles turned out to Gotan's gigs in force, the group have proved even more popular in Italy and Portugal (the first place
Three burning questions:
RFI Musique: Would you define Gotan Project as an innovative, experimental and pioneering group?
Gotan Project: Well, I don't think it's up to us to say whether we're pioneering anything or not. But, yes, we're definitely innovative and experimental. After Boyz from Brasil we made a conscious effort to strike out and explore new musical territory. We'd always been fans of (accordionist) Astor Piazzolla's work, but apart from that we actually knew very little about tango. We had no idea where this new direction would take us, either. We were initially attracted to the strong percussive element in Argentinian folk music, not just tango. Actually, I think one of the most interesting things we've achieved in our work is to take tango back to its African roots.
Electro and tango are musical universes which seem to be light years apart…
Yes, absolutely. Electro's a very recent phenomenon, but tango's got this whole history behind it. It's a music that's been around for 130 years and it belongs to a very erudite tradition. Like the great classical orchestras tango revolves around a music that's very "written." Tango automatically summons up images of dance halls and complicated steps, too, of course. Then there's the bandoneon which is an extremely difficult instrument to play. What we've done in our work is basically transfer all that onto the computer. And one of the most fascinating things we've discovered is the universal across-the-board appeal of tango. We've found tango fans all the way from Cairo and St Petersburg to Moscow and Israel. Tango is definitely Gotan Project's greatest strength!
Visual effects appear to play an important role in your live shows… We've often been really disappointed watching DJs' sets and stuff, so we came up with the idea of doing a sort of on-stage "strip-tease" where the group sort of reveal themselves one step at a time... We work with our own video jockey, too, and during our concerts we present the history of Argentina in images. It's a bit like a video installation you'd find in a contemporary art gallery, in fact.
Pascale Hamon
Translation : Julie Street
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