RFI Musique - - Jazz - Erik Truffaz - have trumpet will travel!

Erik Truffaz - have trumpet will travel!

Paris, Benares, Mexico City

27/11/2008 -

Recession? What recession? Trumpeter Erik Truffaz has decided to defy the credit crunch, bringing out a bumper triple album inspired by multiple trips around the globe. The trio of albums that make up Rendez-vous conjure up colourful images of Paris, Benares and Mexico City. And all three were composed and recorded with musicians Truffaz met on his travels. The Swiss trumpet maestro, currently based in Bourgogne, hooked up with RFI Musique at the EMI HQ for a slightly jet-lagged interview.

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RFI Musique: You've chosen to release a bumper triple album* during a major credit crunch. Are you being blindly optimistic, following a personal whim or is this an act of open provocation?
Erik Truffaz: I just felt like breaking out of the traditional album format. What I wanted was to bring out a series of albums one after the other, so a triple release seemed like the obvious solution. I think I sort of factored all the artistic and economic parameters in intuitively as I went along.
I'm living in Bourgogne now, a beautiful region that's conveniently located between Paris and Switzerland and I've got several airports up the road. I've managed to buy an affordable house there and set up my own studio at home and I think that might have something to do with it. Being able to work at your own pace whenever you get the urge is an absolute luxury these days!

Are the destinations mentioned in the album titles fictitious or did you really go there during the making of Rendez-Vous?
Things actually turned out to be a little more complex than that. I'd originally planned to record three albums over a nine-month period, but I soon realised that wasn't going to be possible. An album takes time ! You've got to write the material, then work in the studio recording, mixing and honing everything to perfection. Then you've got to think about your album as an aesthetic object, what the cover's going to look like and so on, and after that there's the obligatory promotion period. It's not that simple, especially when you're trying to juggle a hectic tour schedule at the same time. Take my Indian album, for instance. I originally came up with the idea for that back at the start of '97 when I was doing an Indian tour organised by the French Embassy in New Delhi. What happened was I met all these amazing musicians in each town I stopped off in and, naturally, I ended up playing with them. I hooked up with the singer Indrani Mukherjee and the tabla-player Apurba Mukherjee in Benares and it was at that point that I felt the first stirrings of an idea.
I admit that my initial encounter with Murcof didn't take place in Mexico City, though. We actually met in Montreux. I didn't know Murcof at all before that. It was in Montreux that I discovered his music for the first time - his sound is very much in the continuity of artists like Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd and Klaus Schulze. He could be a reincarnation of Klaus Schulze, in fact! As for Sly Johnson from Saïan Supa Crew, my meeting with him came about thanks to Georges Fernandez (from EMI) who asked me whether I'd be interested in recording a duet with Sly who's renowned as a human beatbox. I said yes, I thought it was a great idea, but Sly actually stood me up the first time round. He didn't turn up for the arranged meeting. But then a few months later, I was about to start rehearsing for a TV show and the drummer I usually work with wasn't available. Sly happened to be hanging around somewhere backstage, so he stepped in at the last minute. After that, he ended up coming over to my place a few times.

Wasn't it a bit confusing juggling three different locations, three different musical universes and an even greater number of guest musicians?
Well, things were certainly a bit confusing in India as they would be for any musician opening his ears for the first time to the sounds of this fascinating subcontinent where people have en entirely different conception of time. It's as if in some way time is longer, more drawn out for Indians. When Indrani sings, for instance, she's tapping into these codes, this way of organising music, that's a million miles from anything we're used to in the West.
The interval between individual phrases in Indian music is much longer, there's a different system of spacing. Even when musicians improvise you can feel the classical Indian music codes at work. In Indian music, there are certain series of notes you just can't play by going up or down the scale, it's as if scales are almost taboo. My role was to adapt to their codes rather than asking the Indian musicians to adapt to my "non-codes." That's the difficult thing - and the most interesting thing - about collaborating with musicians from other cultures. You have to learn how to bring your divergences together. Tarana, the opening track on the Indian album was actually composed by Indrani and Apurba, and that sort of sets the mood for what's to follow. I love the distinctive timing and spacing in the Indian style of singing. It's something I'd love to be able to do myself in an ideal world. I relate to it in a very visceral way. I learnt an enormous amount working with singers and musicians like these.

And what did you learn working with Sly Johnson?
Sly gave me a lesson in groove! Everything he says is pertinent, right on the ball. And the amazing thing about Sly is that he never rehearses. He's really connected to the spirit of soul, plugged into the heart of Motown.

Your Paris album kicks off with a track entitled Mr Wyatt. Is this a direct tribute to Robert Wyatt?
Yes, I'm a big Robert Wyatt fan. But it's more of a nod to his solo album Rock Bottom than the albums he made with Soft Machine. I love the texture of the sound we came up with on this piece. I felt as if we got close to a Robert Wyatt vibe so that's where the idea for the title came from. But my song titles aren't always significant. Addis Abeba, for instance, happens to have a bit of a dub feel but there's nothing really Ethiopian about it at all. I happened to fly over the Ethiopian capital one day on a plane and I liked the name, that's all!

Trumpeter Jon Hassell is credited on Paris for the arrangements on Nature Boy. Did you work with him at all?
No, I just used his arrangements so I included him in the credits.

How did you go about working with Murcof on the three tracks he contributed to your project?
Murcof's another story altogether. The way I see it, he's a contemporary composer straight out of the classical school. Everything he does is always very polished, very crafted, very precise. I called the third album Mexico (Mexico City) to fit in with the overall city theme, but to me the music actually conjures up images of the desert in Lower California where Murcof comes from. We actually started out working together over the Internet. I recorded pieces of certain tracks then sent them to him to see whether he liked them. He liked what he heard so we moved on to exchanging digital music files. At the end of the process, Murcof flew over and joined me in the studio and we finished everything in four days flat.

Talking of the Internet, you've been very generous and given fans the chance to download free concerts from your website. What's that all about?
It's a sort of special bonus, an idea a couple of friends of mine came up with. If you access "La Blogothèque", you can download pieces I recorded live at surprise locations. The latest ones were recorded live in the street in Paris, in the 12th arrondissement.

Do you have any other Rendez-vous lined up in your agenda?
No, there's nothing fixed right now. But I know I'll definitely make some other kind of Rendez-Vous album in the future. What I'm working on right now is the idea of recording an album as a quartet and that will probably come out at the end of next year.