THE CLICHƒ ABOUT FRANCE HAS
LONG BEEN that it's incapable of producing Great Rock Music, a condition owing
to the French language itself, which is too soft, too nuanced, to make the
proper impact in a forceful rock way. Ironically, though, in 1969 France
gave birth to a group called Magma, one of the heaviest bands the rock
world has ever known, and simultaneously not a rock band at all.
The ensemble was formed in Paris by drummer
Christian Vander, the stepson of French jazz pianist Maurice Vander.
Christian had been playing jazz and pop professionally since his early
teens ÐÐ he received his first drum set from jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, who
stole it from hisdrummer. Vander gathered players from all over the country
who were dissatisfied with the typical French habit of slavishly copying
American or British rock and jazz musicians. At the time, he says,
"everyone had flowers on their clothes, but I preferred to see flowers
in the meadows." Magma dressed in black.
A raven-haired, powerfully built man of
swarthy hue and wolfish glare, Vander was and is of a darkly cosmological
bent, and had an early fascination with Gurdjieff. Musically, Coltrane was
everything to him, and Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones made a big impact on
Vander's multilimbed, badass drum style. Not wishing to play jazz, exactly
ÐÐ he still considers it a specifically black American art form ÐÐ for Magma
he drew on the folkloric music of his Polish Gypsy forebears. The band's
signature sound evolved via chanting, guttural vocals and much use of
repetitive motifs pumped out on multiple acoustic and electric pianos and
horns, atop militaristically hefty bass and drums.
But the French language ÐÐ too soft, and
Vander disliked the sound of English as well. So he made up his own tongue,
a vaguely Germanic, craggily mellifluous thing called Kobaian. Vander's
vision was grand, and apocalyptic: He developed a concept for Magma's
recorded output, proposing a nine-part sci-fi-ish opus that would tell the
story of the Kobaians, who'd fled the degradation of life on Earth and
settled on another planet, only to find they'd dragged Earth's miseries
along with them; the solution was annihilation. The opus was never
completed; after the release of Part 4, M‘kan•k Destrukt•w Kommandšh, the plan seems to have been
abandoned, though the group continued to sing in Kobaian and a mixture of
English, French and vocalese.
So, yes, concept albums, a made-up language,
quasi-operatic vocals ÐÐ these things naturally made American rock critics,
with their folk chords and populist anthems, flee in droves. Yet Vander's arcane
world-view was not that far removed from the eccentricities of the
quintessentially hip Sun Ra, for example. At its best, Magma's music, in
particular the above-mentioned MDK and the mysterious follow-up, the masterful Kšhntarkšsz, defined a sound roughly
intersecting progressive jazz, Bart—k and heavy metal, related texturally
to Mahavishnu Orchestra and King Crimson.
Kšhntarkšsz, released in 1974, concerns
an exploration of an Egyptian tomb, its serpentine, mozaical structure
redolent of incense, mold and fire. As it plays so cryptically with time
and countertime, it's a piece of music whose code you'll probably never
decipher, and thus remains timeless.
Magma's sound grew wicked,
culminating in the 18-minute metal masterpiece "De Futura" from
the album †dŸ WŸdŸ, written by the band's then-bassist Jannick Top, who tuned
his bass down to C for an extra-heavy wallop. Vander's music could not,
however, sustain all that dark hubris, and over the years Magma became more
shaded, lyrical even. Band members for this technically demanding
enterprise came and went; many of France's best players, including
violinist Didier Lockwood and bassist Bernard Paganotti, joined the ranks.
(In France, you had to have played with Magma in order to say that you were
really a professional musician.)
Vander himself is without a doubt one of the
three or four greatest drummers the Continent has ever produced. An
audacious maelstrom of controlled polyrhythmic fury, he's a feral cross
between Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Rashied Ali and, of course, Elvin
Jones, and Magma can be recommended if only for the powerful originality of
his instrumental chops. In recent years he's formed two other bands,
Offering and the Christian Vander Trio, to further explore his jazz roots,
and has engaged Magma in varied instrumental frameworks, including
performances with large choirs and a version of MDK sung by a children's chorus.
Christian Vander's drive toward a deeply
personal music mirrors that of his countryman Claude Debussy, who at one
point began billing himself as "Claude Debussy, musicien franais." In order to create a
new kind of music, Vander invented, finally, a music that was unique to
France, yet rarely sounds remotely French. His vision has inspired an
actual genre in France and Japan, called Zeuhl Music, with several bands
adopting the Magma model of folkloric chants, twinkling ostinatos and
raging rhythm sections.
Perhaps you've seen the band's logo, a crepuscular
orb that reflects the music itself, where it's not always so obvious which
is the sun and which is the moon.
