OnTheFlip : Blue Note Festival

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With an impressive new Express Way album and movie project for Blue Note, French outfit The Troublemakers have expanded their musical identities from cinematic funk to embrace jazz, soul and even the odd Gainsbourg-esque guitars. The core Troublemaker duo East and DJ Oil welcomed Nicolai Hartvig for a Blue Note Festival post-show backstage chat...

They haven’t had their dinner yet and are making restaurant plans –they want to be back in time for the Angie Stone gig. Troublemakers duo Lionel Corsini, aka DJ Oil, and Arnaud Taillefer, aka East, are reclining side by side on a beige wicker couch in the white canvas backstage tent at the Blue Note Festival in Ghent. Their band has just faced the arduous task of opening the second day of the All That Jazz? weekender and the concert tent filled up slowly throughout the 90-minute performance. But the attendance suited the Marseille combo. Their concert went well and the mood is one of relaxation. We're speaking French, which the duo prefers, and their slight 'accents Marseillais' are most endearing. “It’s actually nice to play this early with a somewhat sparse public and see the venue fill up slowly –at least it didn’t empty out, which was the most important thing,” says a smiling and seemingly relieved Oil. “We played a more settled concert than we usually do, we had the time to make ourselves comfortable on stage, to make the songs evolve without being pressured to cater for a large crowd who’s been there for five or six hours and has seen four or five different concerts already. Here at the Blue Note Festival, the audience is here to listen to music and not necessarily to dance or get drunk and party. It’s great for us to do a concert in these surroundings.”

Playing the Blue Note Festival has been a reassuring experience for the whole Troublemakers outfit, who are only on their seventh concert and working on improving their live performance –synching images from the Express Way movie with graphics created especially by Marseille agency C4 and of course, the Express Way music. “Were still fine-tuning how we capture the audience with both image and sound, which is a little bit like the album. You can be just as interested by the movie as by the record, really,” says Oil. “We only played one song from our first album and we’ll try to integrate one or two more as the tour progresses. I’m not really fond of playing the old hits… well, they’re not really hits, but you know what I mean. But we’ll do it because we are lucky enough to work with good musicians, so we can work out some alternate versions, different from the first album. But that means more work. We’ve chained-up the movie, the record, preparing the live concerts… we’ve been working intensively for two years. So now we’re taking it slow.”

East looks out from behind a Castro-style red cap pulled halfway down in front of his eyes. He lets Oil do the talking and his piercing gaze and reluctance to speak gives a distinct impression of a blazé attitude to interviews. Asked about the mesmerizing change that the Troublemakers have gone through since their debut album Doubts and convictions, East responds with a vague ‘yeah, it’s an evolution, maybe. It’s just our feel for it, our inspiration, the music that we listen to every day." He sits with his hands together, keeping our conversation under a watchful eye. It seems that he prefers to let his music speak for himself and any attempt to explain or define it is futile and will never adequately define his art. Which is not far from the truth but the Troublemakers’ invigorating change is evident when one listens to the Express Way album. Gone is the uneasy and often overly artificial standard cinematic funk formula. The new Troublemakers sound is organic, lively and expands into pure soul and funk genres, with parallels to such widespread artists as Urban Species, Freddie Hubbard, Roy Ayers and Serge Gainsbourg.

East offers a glimpse of an explanation. “There’s more life, it’s less linear. It’s more written,” he says in tandem with Oil, who continues : “There’s almost nothing but live instruments, only very few samples. We had a slightly larger budget than we did for the first album, so we could get more musicians in. Apart from that, we worked pretty much the same way as on the first album, with our methods of capturing the sounds and cutting-up the musicians’ parts. So we did in a way use the instruments as samples that we will sprinkle around this or that part of a song, we didn’t necessarily use the entire take of any musician. We worked from piano melodies that Arnaud wrote and little by little, we built up the songs with the contributions of the different musicians that came by the studio, based on sort of scale models that we had constructed. We then wrote the lyrics and worked with rappers. In it’s process of development and in our desire to make something more alive, and more personal in a way, we finally found ourselves in the music.” The departure of third Troublemakers member Fred Berthet also had an impact. “I think that Fred’s absence plays and important part with regards to the musicality of the new album, says East. “He had a more linear approach to music. It was more repetitive, with a focus on dancefloor accessibility, somewhat mechanical. “We like that too, but on this album we don’t do that, really,” says Oil, before East continues :

“We have a more spontaneous approach to the music. I started making music with a guitar, not a computer and that’s not the same thing. Placing bars or building tracks has nothing to do with a computer. With the computer, it’s always 16 bars, 16 bars, 8 bars, 16 bars… with an instrument it’s completely different.” The reduction to two core members has clearly helped the Oil/East partnership. “Arnaud writes the songs on the piano and wrote the script for the movie –and those two were really the starting point for the entire project," Oil explains. "I’m there to comfort Arnaud in his choices and afterwards, work on the recordings and the editing, on the ‘that’s good, the doesn’t work’ and ‘this musician would be great and this one not’… So we’ve worked a lot on recording and mixing like that.. we met nose to nose with each other after the last musician had passed through the studio and said ‘voilà’.. and bit by bit the songs were built.”

The increased budget opened the path for Oil and East to recruit special guests for the Express Way project. Most spotters will have picked out Blackalicious man The Gift of Gab, who took his time to send Arnaud and Lionel his input on a tape in the mail. “It was a long wait for us, it ended up taking two or three months. But we weren’t disappointed with the result. And we never really knew what to expect,” says East. But the duo had worked with Gab over them phone, explaining the theme of the movie and the essence of the project to the Bay Area rapper. “We wanted to make sure that all the songs on the album, all the lyrics that we wrote, all the lyrics that we sampled from other albums or movies and all the lyrics of the hip hop tracks would be tigthly connected to the movie, even if the songs didn’t make it into the film,” says Oil. “So we explained the script and the theme of each hip hop track to Gift of Gab over the phone, so that he could understand how to articulate himself for the album. And from the start, he was very interested by the project and also the instrumentals that we had created especially for him.”

The Express Way movie was written and directed by East and developed along with the music on the new album. Express Way is a foray into the urban spirit and soul, the melancholic beauty of hard-knock lives, battles between one’s own identity and one’s identity reflected in society. It’s about love, strife, race, passion and both the blessing and burden of a past and inherited culture. “I don’t know if there really is a theme,” East says. “It groups together many things. It’s about identity, our relationship with society, with family, with the father and the mother...” The Express Way movie has a freeform feel to it, an incredible flow that captures emotion and moods successfully… it is impressive that such a flow was maintained even when working from a written script –and East insists that everything was planned, frame by frame. Developing the movie along with the music has no doubt had an impact. “There is a common vehicle,” says East. “The ideas are developed in the lyrics, in the atmosphere of the songs and in the movie. We start the film with a long travelling and the music is also like a long sonic travelling, with percussions and reminiscences of Africa, which correspond to the thoughts of the character in the first scene of the movie.”

Critics have been quick to draw connections between Express Way and blaxploitation movies –which is both a reflection of the popularity of the genre as quoted inspiration for moviemakers of today… and also an indication that it is sadly still a novelty to have black actors as the only leads in a serious film. To Arnaud and Lionel, there is no real link. “ It’s more like a wink of an eye towards the blaxploitation genre. Anyway, blaxploitation music, funk, black music, it’s more or less the same thing,” says East. Oil continues : “Our approach is more abstract, whereas blaxploitation films are quite concrete and very poor script-wise. It’s the music that interests us most in blaxploitation. Other than that, we both use black actors, which is a very basic similarity. And the scripts and production of those films was also made by whites.” And East finishes :” It was a business as well. We’re not ardent fans of blaxploitation, we never watch blaxploitation movies. We must have seen them four or five times, but they quickly become boring. We’re more intersted by other cinema, like Melville, than by blaxploitation.”

When the subject of Blue Note is raised, a gleam is found in the duos eyes, the disbelief still shining through. Signing for the legendary label is clearly an important achievement. “We’re proud, we’re feeling really small,” says a smiling and grateful DJ Oil. “We’re minute, in fact, “ says East. Oil composes himself. “We are really happy. But we are coming in through the little door, we have to be careful,” he says with a slightly nervous laugh.”It was a challenge for both Blue Note and for us. But we never pressured ourselves because of this signature, It’s not because we’re now on Blue Note that our album sounds more jazz – we incorporated our own sound, a lot of hip hop and there are no hip hop albums on Blue Note. “There was US3,” East says. “Yeah, but that was a business project,” says Oil. Signing to Blue Note also provides the Troublemakers with a base closer to home, after working with Chicago label Guidance for Doubts and Convictions. Then there’s the benefit of being on the French jazz scene. “Jazz has always had an important impact in France,” says Oil. “Most jazz musicians live in Paris at some point in their lives, because France is, like Belgium actually, a country that has done a lot for jazz music, soul and funk.

Marvin Gaye lived in Belgium, I even think he lived here in Ghent. France and Belgium have always been countries that welcomed black artists and offered them a much better life than the United States did.” Being accepted into the Blue Note family also means sharing a label with progressive French trumpet player Erik Truffaz, who like The Troublemakers is experimenting with a fusion of electronic genres and jazz. Both Oil and East are only lukewarm at the idea of a collaboration. “It could be fun to do a track with him,” says Oil, “but the musicians we work with now are artists with whom we share a musical affinity. We don’t know Erik Truffaz, we’ve never met and I prefer to work with people that I know a little. It’s nice to label a song ‘The Troublemakers with Erik Truffaz” but it’s not the most important thing to us”. East concludes “we were never really influenced by what he has done anyway.” Bon apetit, les Troublemakers...

The Troublemakers will be touring Europe this autumn. The Express Way album is out now on Blue Note Records. A limited edition double CD/DVD pack with the album and the movie is available. The movie will also be released on a separate DVD.

The Troublemakers @ Blue Note Festival, Ghent Belgium, Saturday July 24th 2004 :

The screen behing the band lights up and the inaugurative scene of the Express Way movie rolls across the canvas to the tune of album opener Every day is just and extension of yesterday. From then on, the films images are cut up, sequenced in a non-linear fashion without fidelity to the film script and interspersed with graphic patch backgrounds created by Marseilla Agency C4. The flutist enters playing a half-empty clear waterbottle whilst DJ Oil, East and the rest of the Troublemakers live crew take their positions behind the two keys, three decks and programming engines.

DJ Oil and East keep frequent eye contact across the stage to coordinate the flow and progress of the jammed and altered versions of the songs, all but one of which are taken from the Express Way album. Oil also keeps taps on all the other musicians, coordinating from behind the turntables. He adds his little touches at the decks, occasionally throwing in sampled movie dialogue and bobbing his head as he mimicks the dialogue of the sample man’s voice. The DJ picks up a classic Blue Note beat and layers it with a hectic and sharp birdsong crab-scratch.

The musicians are deeply engulfed in their twitching of knobs and fingering of keys and only the two singer/flutists afford themselves some liberty of movement which they use for some friendly banter, feeding off each other. Singer Sandra N’Kake sensually swings her arms from side to side and steps softly in place, breaking for the occasional handclaps. The flutist suddenly launches into a staccato girl-like child’s voice half-conversation with himself, defiantly telling and imaginary friend : ‘you’re mean, and I don’t want to play with you any more’ and going into a both funny and very convincing typical kids’ playground rant. Sandra N’Kake gives the flute a try but cannot understand why there is no sound. The flutist helpfully plugs the hole that she missed with his index finger, releasing the note, to the smiles of all band members.

The Troublemakers’ performance is very laidback, but this suits the music well –it would be odd if band members had been jumping around and throwing hard party beats into the live renditions of fundamentally downbeat jazz and soul escapades. Seeing the Troublemakers live is reminiscent of concerts by The Cinematic Orchestra or Bill Laswell, with a similar entrancing slow-paced comfortable performance. The drop of a thumping beat on And there’s music everywhere gets heads nodding but the band are actually at their most mesmerising on the slowest songs like Highway blues, where soft vocals and occasional flute screechings soar over a delicately balanced mesh of beats and samples. On this day, The Troublemakers translated the moods of the Express Way project well into a live setting and invited the audience to listen and dwell on the music, which made it a very good opener for the second day of the Blue Note Festival.