Music
5 things you should know about Chassol
Meet the man who you’ll be able to hear playing all over Frank Ocean’s forthcoming album.
With Frank Ocean's Boys Don't Cry album finally set to drop in July, it's time to acquaint yourself with the revolutionising R 'n' B artist's most interesting new collaborator. Christophe Chassol is a French pianist, film score composer and audio-visual maverick. He's worked with Gallic pop stars Sébastien Tellier and Phoenix, and recently released his fourth album, Big Sun. The record concludes a globe-trotting trilogy of breezy but quick-witted experimental jazz woven around the sights and sounds of New Orleans, India and his family's West Indian birthplace of Martinique.
The son of a saxophonist and bus driver, Chassol has been playing piano since the age of four, and is signed to Bertrand Burgalat’s Parisian label, Tricatel. Here's what else you need to know.
Watch the making of Chassol's Big Sun in the player below.
He's the inventor of the "ultrascore" “In movie music you either have the Mickey Mouse thing, which is very literal, or you have the psychological thing. What I'm trying to do is to use the sounds of the images themselves, to discover the music of real life. On Big Sun you hear different birds, a singer mimicking the birds, domino games harmonised, an old woman at the market… If I action something in my mind then I can hear music in everything. I know my heritage. I've been stealing speech harmonising, where I fix notes to spoken words, from Steve Reich and Hermeto Pascoal. Even [Béla] Bartok was doing this in the '30s. We have to steal, to share – ideas don’t belong to anyone."
Frank Ocean invited him to collaborate at Abbey Road "Diplo had told him about me because he heard the speech harmonising on my record Indiamore. I did a lot of things: synthesisers, string arrangements, voices, bass. We spent time at nights working, playing, drumming, discussing. We talked about music, art, nations, culture, blackness, so many things. I have no idea what will end up on his album yet. But I enjoyed the work very much. It brought me to tears at some points. The voice of the guy – there is something deep in there. He made me think of Michael Jackson. There is one track that is very mellow, on the edge of being cheesey, but with him singing it's very elegant."
The advent of YouTube changed his course as an artist "I started studying at the Conservatoire when I was four, and when I was 17 I started jazz school, and when I was 21 I had my own band and an orchestra of 24 musicians. But my current sound really started in 2005, when YouTube was created. I had time to experiment and access to lots of videos. I started working with auto-sampling. Suddenly I could play my piano and each note was a sample. It was like an explosion!"
It's all a joke – a serious joke "I had this discussion with Christian [Mazzalai] from Phoenix when we were on tour. We arrived at the conclusion that in life you have two kinds of people: the ones who are seeking jokes, and the ones who aren’t. In my mind there is fun and humour in everything that I do. 'Classical music: serious music, cultural music, austere music!' I am tired of this. And I'm not at all a Berlin electronic musician that goes on a table with his laptop in hushed silence, not moving, not able to dance. Oh no, it's not me at all. I am smiling."
His phone is ringing off the hook "Yes, and the worst is Facebook. I've been in the situation of writing to musicians and wanting then to respond. And now I have so many messages from people wanting to work with me that I cannot respond. It makes me sad, because I know how it feels. At the moment I'm working on a score for a dreamy film starring Jean Rochefort, a very famous 85-year-old French actor. He saw me on TV and called me. And I am working on my own s**t, some little… experimentations."
Chassol's Big Sun is out – buy it here.
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