Les Diseurs de Musique

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Paris' CCAM Studios serves as the melting pot in which poet Serge Pey engages the spirited acoustic improvisation of extraordinary percussionist Lê Quan Ninh and saxophonists Michel Doneda and Daunik Lazro. The object of Les Diseurs de Musique ("Those Who Speak the Music") is the sublimation of language from music. Pey's stories, printed as texts on long sticks in the narrative tradition of native Central American cultures, are brought to life through the bubbly gossiping of the instrumentalists even before he begins his animated recitations. Lazro takes his alto and baritone horns on fleet exploratory flights around the periphery of "Toi qui Défais le Cercle." He asks the questions - the curious "and then?"s and interjected "you must be joking!"s - as Doneda blurts sentences and sentence fragments in his colloquial soprano, so caught up in the telling that his "words" gush forth as a prattle of giddy chirps and parenthetical flourishes. Ninh's eloquent percussive vocabulary fleshes out the stories. His flusters and flurries supply both the concrete facts - the setting and physical descriptions - and the fascinating conversational tangents which elaborate on Lazro's sketchier details. By the time the loquacious musicians have brought their chat down to a dull twitter (punctuated by frequent rude rustles and whispers amongst themselves), the tale has already been told. In essence, Pey's telling is more of a retelling, with the members of the trio listening somewhat attentively but chuckling to one another as if to say, "Isn't that what we just got through saying?" Pey takes the more proactive role in "Mange le Feu," declaiming his fiery prose while straining to overpower the musician's caterwauling crescendos with nothing but his voice and the time-keeping tapping of his foot. Their frenetic racket finally overcomes him, and Pey steps back away from the microphone, out of breath and speechless, just as the noise dies away in the near-silent epilogue of "Et Maintenant j'ai Trois Arcs Colorés." The quiet persists into "Poétique," the meter of Pey's words gaining in insistence against a backdrop of peakish sustained notes and the slicing sonorities of bowed metal which finally consumes them. Pey surrenders the stage to the musicians, to Ninh in particular, whose hands dance lightly around a forest of fanciful percussion in the twinkling and thoroughly splendid "Dieu est un Chien Dans les Arbres." Ninh is a battery from whom an astonishing array of improvised noises explode with the brilliance of sparks - here a shrill squeak, a tap, a rapping or a rustle, there a cascade of frozen raindrops. He commands an apparently limitless variety of percussive sounds and challenges others to match his resourcefulness. Doneda and Lazro do so admirably on "Je Voudrais Parler d'un Couloir," contorting notes into strange shapes and hyperventilating yelps, as though the three are engaged in a fierce competition to squeeze the most outlandish sounds from their instruments. Obviously such games overshadow Pey, drawing attention away from his decorously recited words and directing all ears towards the improvisers' far more interesting efforts. The project's central conceit falls by the wayside, almost becoming an intrusion on the masterful free-play of Doneda, Lazro and Ninh. At these points, as on the unmissable "Dans Chaque Mot Une Majuscule Dort," Pey knows enough to step aside and encourages the musicians to carry the show. His graciousness and altruism contribute as much to the success of Les Diseurs de Musique as the poems which kindled these improvisations and the musicians whose blazing explorations ultimately set them afire.