Le 50èmes Hurlants Trio – Live Session

The 50èmes hurlants Trio, led by poet Tom Buron and featuring trumpeter Fred Aubin (La Maison Tellier) and drummer Grégoire Mainot (MNNQNS), release a live session blending jazz and poetry.

Eric Dolphy, Zorn, Mingus & Coltrane

Fred Aubin: We initially embarked on a tour of around a dozen concert-readings of Les Cinquantièmes hurlants as a duo, following the publication of Tom’s book by Gallimard last year: Maison de la Poésie in Paris and Nantes, Pavillon Carré de Baudoin, La Maison du Livre in Brussels, and so on. During the tour, we both felt that expanding the lineup would give us greater expressive possibilities. Tom was already using a little percussion, but we wanted to take things further. I immediately thought of Grégoire, a highly inventive drummer with a very open artistic outlook. We had both worn out the seats of the same conservatory benches, albeit in different generations. We met there in the jazz department, then crossed paths again years later within La Maison Tellier, when he happened to step in for our regular drummer for around fifteen dates. His role in the rock band MNNQNS, combined with his versatility, made him the obvious man for the job. He agreed to join the adventure, and we set about adapting Tom’s powerful, monumental text from duo to trio, before going on to explore other forms, other texts and other sounds that are still waiting to be discovered.

Tom Buron: When Grégoire joined us last winter, we immediately committed to a date two months later at a venue I’m particularly fond of, La Baraque in Rouen. That’s how it all began. The idea was to move quickly and capitalize on the momentum surrounding the book, which had just won the Prix Apollinaire Découverte. After four or five weeks of studio work, we had adapted what we had previously performed as a duo for three, with quite a few structural changes and new ideas, so that the drums would obviously be more than simply an accompanying force. By December, the 50èmes hurlants Trio was born, and in February we played our first concert: a roughly one-hour set built around a three-part adaptation of my poem Les Cinquantièmes hurlants. Some people in the audience were dancing, which was something new for us. We were very fortunate to secure some great dates soon afterwards. We played at the Terres de paroles Festival and the Jazz & poésie Festival, and were then invited to present the project on TSF Jazz morning shows, even though we had not been around for quite five months.

In July, we were booked for an evening at the Les Terrasses du jeudi festival in Rouen, a festival geared more towards a general audience. You have to picture something like an outdoor Fête de la Musique, held in one of the city’s most beautiful squares. Programming poetry and jazz in that setting was a bold move on the part of the organizers. There was absolutely no guarantee that the audience would embrace such a hybrid form. In the end, it was a genuine success.

Tom Buron: At the outset, the idea was to start from jazz and bring it into contact with the other genres we love, while combining it with spoken, embodied, rhythmic poetry. As far as my role in the group is concerned, namely the voice, my direct influences naturally come more from rock and blues, and the challenge is to make them come alive within a form of jazz that we love. I listen to a lot of the Lounge Lizards, as well as Eric Dolphy, Zorn, Don Cherry, Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Monk too, but also quite a few contemporary musicians such as James Brandon Lewis, Shabaka Hutchings and his various projects, Ambrose Akinmusire and Isaiah Collier, to name but a few.

I’m also very fond of the work of my friend Antoine Berjeaut, with whom I have a project that leans more towards jazz and electronics. You should listen to his album Moving Cities, produced by Makaya McCraven. A few days ago in Rouen, I went to hear Aymeric Avice with Luke Stewart and Chad Taylor, a drummer I’ve seen several times with James Brandon Lewis. It’s a very contemporary proposition, full of ideas. More recently, I really enjoyed Stéphane Kerecki’s Charlie Haden tribute project, Liberation Song, Immanuel Wilkins’ Live at the Village Vanguard, and JB Lewis’ Deface the Currency with the Messthetics. I can’t wait to hear the new Marc Ribot album, which is coming very soon…

To come back to the Trio, I think we’re actually making a kind of music that comes from jazz, with poetic prose, for people who like weird stuff.

Grégoire Mainot: Basically, my musical background is very spontaneously rooted in rock. That’s my natural territory, and I go there without even thinking about it. But I’ve realized that my entry point into jazz developed in exactly the same way: through lineage and curiosity. As a teenager, I listened obsessively to The Strokes, which naturally led me to Television, and then to the whole New York scene around CBGB. My journey into jazz followed much the same path. A friend at the conservatory introduced me to Joshua Redman, and Brian Blade’s playing was a revelation. He was the one who then opened the door to Max Roach for me.

Today, I’m convinced that both of these drummers have profoundly shaped my approach to jazz. Beyond those guiding figures, I’ve always been fascinated by improvisation, particularly the idea of constructing a musical statement in real time within a precise framework. Finding freedom within constraint. It’s a central principle in jazz, but strangely enough, it’s also a mechanism I recognize in composers of repetitive music such as Steve Reich or John Cage: imposing strict rules on yourself in order to explore the space more freely.

On drums, the possibilities are infinite. You can literally do anything and imagine anything. Setting yourself a context, a framework within which to play, in order to improvise more freely is something that stimulates me enormously. And that’s precisely what we’re experimenting with at the moment with Tom and Fred in the 50èmes hurlants Trio.

Fred Aubin: On my side, Miles Davis, of course. Apart from his talent, he offers the advantage of allowing you to travel across an extraordinarily broad horizon of jazz, from bop to the experimental. Very quickly, by extension, I absorbed a great deal of Chet Baker, who fascinates me for his expressiveness, his timing and, in his own way, his refusal to make artistic concessions.

Then Tom Harrell naturally comes to mind. His themes are so economical that they sometimes border on naïveté, yet his solos are so inspired that I regard several of them as models for the practice of modern jazz. It was also through him that I discovered the trumpet-and-drums duo without bass or piano, on his album Number Five.

And finally, since we have to bring things to a close, the great master: Wynton Marsalis. Not content with probably being the finest trumpet player in the world, across all styles and eras, he has become the repository, guardian and transmitter of an entire century of African-American musical culture. He is the only one who can make you hear Armstrong and Coltrane brought together in a single performance, while still serving his own artistic sensibility. He’s simply the boss…

Coming back to the trumpet-and-drums combination that defines us, and to what it makes possible: it’s true that there is neither bass nor harmonic instrument in our trio, but that has never been a problem. Quite the opposite. It’s our distinctive feature. That absence frees up an extraordinary expressive potential that even I hadn’t suspected. The interplay happens directly, without constraints, in very concrete terms.

The approach has something in common with contemporary music: seeking effect and expression above all else, regardless of the means used to achieve them. I impose certain modal constraints on myself, which serve as the basis for the themes and their development. But the way we play is quite different from traditional jazz formations such as quartets or quintets, which are highly structured, with each musician playing a defined role. Here, the two instruments interact directly with each other and with the voice, all on the same level.

To watch the video, tap on the image:

Cinquantièmes hurlants

Fred Aubin: In constructing the piece Cinquantièmes hurlants, we tried to structure Tom’s long and complex text in such a way that the listener could understand it and, above all, feel it. We didn’t want a mere musical wallpaper, but music that would be an integral part of the text.

I should add that it was through the music of Tom’s spoken delivery that I began finding themes, structures and atmospheres, much more easily than through the written text. We weren’t trying to fit ourselves into any particular style. We simply let our senses guide us in building the whole thing. That’s why we find ourselves moving between sea shanty, blues, passages inspired by Elevator to the Gallows, Sketches of Spain (Miles again!), Coltrane-influenced jazz and contemporary atonal music.

Cinquantièmes Hurlants

Since I play very different styles myself, from jazz and classical music to rock and folk, I no longer pay much attention to the boundaries between genres. Things simply emerge because they feel relevant at that precise moment.

Tom Buron: It started with the idea of the sea. It’s a narrative poem about the chaotic journey of a lost sailor searching for an island. We needed a theme that would convey that idea. I had something along the lines of The Pogues in mind, and then Fred very quickly came up with this sailor’s theme that we hear at the beginning and which returns at several points.

Beyond that, there’s a foundation of jazz and blues, but, as Fred says, classical music, bossa nova and pasodoble also find their way in at various moments. For Cinquantièmes hurlants – Part III, I told Fred I was thinking about Sketches of Spainand fragments of pasodoble. Roughly speaking, that was the direction I had in mind for this section. There was something tragic about it, but also something martial. I could see a fighting bull somewhere in there…

Grégoire Mainot: If I had to clarify things, I’d focus mainly on the three-way dynamic and on what I was asked to bring to the drums. From our very first exchanges, Fred, Tom and I were clear about the challenge: to bring in drums capable of carrying a genuine musical statement.

We quickly brought up the soundtrack to Birdman, entirely composed and performed by Antonio Sánchez. He’s an exceptional drummer, and when I discovered the film, the idea really struck me. Building an entire soundtrack around solo acoustic drums, without traditional harmony or an obvious melodic framework, seemed pretty risky on paper. But in reality, it works in an astonishing way: the drums become the main narrator, much as a solo piano might.

It also reminded me of a skateboarding segment I had seen at the time, where the images were carried entirely by acoustic drums in total improvisation, very much in the contemporary jazz vein. It brought an incredibly modern energy to the images.

That illustrative approach guided me with the Trio, with one important difference: here, we’re not illustrating images, but a text. Thinking about the drums from that perspective, with something very raw, organic, almost vulnerable, was the real driving force behind developing my playing and integrating it into the Trio’s sound.

Music & Poetry

Tom Buron: How does it work? We listen to each other… My work with words is naturally very much shaped by music. We think as a trio, while each of us also has our own moment.

As far as I’m concerned, I spent years reciting my texts at so many festivals and venues with musicians I didn’t know: saxophonists, pianists, cellists, guitarists, all kinds of musicians… Completely on the fly. It wasn’t always easy. Some were used to playing with poets, actors or spoken-word performers, while others weren’t at all. I learned an enormous amount from that.

With Les Cinquantièmes hurlants, beyond sections specifically designed for solos and periods of improvisation, everything was calculated down to the last detail, and through repeated rehearsals we accumulated shared gestures and reflexes. There were long stretches of rhythmic spoken prose. We’re currently working on shorter pieces, some of which have a more conventional verse-and-chorus structure. But with Les Cinquantièmes, it really was a monumental undertaking…

Fred Aubin: Exactly. The structure is also determined by certain strong words or lines that serve as markers, either to delimit two sections or to give us a meeting point, whether between two of us or all three. They can be repeated and associated with a musical element.

The return of certain themes seems important to us in order to consolidate the whole structure and give it a certain symmetrical clarity. We also choose where the text needs to breathe and insert improvisations there. The whole thing is both solidly constructed and fluid, different at every concert, yet structured.

Grégoire Mainot: There’s something quite funny I’ve realized over time: of all the art forms I’ve been exposed to, poetry was never the one that spoke to me most naturally. So when I discovered Les Cinquantièmes hurlants, my first thought was that it was an incredibly intricate piece of writing.

At first, I even reassured myself by thinking, “It’s normal if I don’t understand everything. My role is to inject music into it. I’ll find another way of existing within the piece.” In the beginning, even after several readings, I was a little lost. I didn’t necessarily have all the keys.

But in reality, through repetition and by putting the words to music, the meaning gradually caught up with me by way of the music. After hearing the text going round and round in my head, certain sentences suddenly became completely clear.

Today, I’m much better able to distinguish between the literal meaning and the pure musicality of the words. It was a real relief to realize just how naturally a text like this could be set to music.

As Fred said, we never really struggled with the absence of a traditional harmonic foundation in relation to our instrumental setup. Everything happened organically. We don’t try to over-illustrate the text, otherwise we’d immediately fall into cliché or caricature.

In the end, the text emerges with a whole new sense of depth. It takes on an entirely different dimension, precisely because it is carried by the raw energy and dynamics of our trio.

Tom Buron: Exactly. Everything takes on such a different dimension that, in the finished piece, it is no longer a question of accompanying a text at all. It is simply three energies responding to one another and becoming one, with the voice of the text acting as an instrument alongside the others.

Interview by Franck Médioni