Some Jazz Records: Jacques Thollot Clippings
Comments on recordings from musicians and other actors of the jazz scene. Random and not-so-random listening cues from the archives.
Sonny Rollins, The Bridge, RCA Victor LPM(LSP)-2527, 1962, LP.
"One of my first discoveries about guitar in jazz was through Sonny Rollins, […] with Jim Hall," Jacques Thollot says on the tape of a 1995 conversation with guitarist Noël Akchoté. "The Bridge—which might be one of his most well-known records, a reference—I was really crazy about this one." Thollot, who had started to be known as a "child prodigy" drumming at the Club Saint-Germain a few years earlier, was still only 15 when Rollins released his comeback album in 1962.
Jacques Thollot, Intramusique, d’Avantage d’av 06/Alga Marghen plana-T alga043, 2017, LP.
During an interview with Les Allumés du jazz (included in English in Nato’s Thollot in Extenso CD), Jacques Thollot was asked about his work with fellow drummer Eddy Gaumont under the name "Intra Musique." "It was not the duet that was called that, it was a whole movement," Thollot said. "We wanted to get ahead of the critics and name our movement. There was only one Intra Musique concert, at the Faculté de droit." Music from this concert—reportedly from 1969 but possibly from a bit earlier—was eventually released in 2017 by d’Avantage and Alga Marghen. "It was in line with with ideas I had about composition, form, and a certain kind of classicism. Eddy Gaumont would surely have been the musician of the century. The atmosphere of the times and the way he lived led him to take his own life [in 1971]."
Steve Lacy, Moon, BYG 529.352, 1971, LP.
"Among the few records I have contributed to, the one we did in Rome with Steve Lacy, Moon, is quite dear to me," Jacques Thollot said during an interview with Les Allumés du jazz. Those September 1969 Italian recordings made up the last free jazz title to be released in BYG’s Actuel series, in 1971. "Steve believes that I only play that way on this session, I know he liked it. I must say that Rome is inspiring. After that, I made experiments, little songs, and he told me 'when you’ll be through with that shit…,' in a way that was not at all indelicate. I was trying something, there was nothing obvious about it, and his judgment proved far from useless. You don’t compose little songs like that… You need to be born without the rest to do it…"
Charlie Haden, Liberation Music Orchestra, Impulse AS-9183, 1969, LP.
Talking about the prospect of making a first album under his name in a 1970 Jazz Magazine interview, Jacques Thollot veered into a discussion of Charlie Haden’s recently released Liberation Music Orchestra. "The selection is going to be very wide," Thollot said of his project, "like Charlie Haden’s Impulse album, which I adore and which I think you adore too. I’m interested in the fact that Charlie has chosen themes that have an ideological weight in addition to a musical weight. […] Right now, social consciousness is very important among musicians. That’s what I like about François Tusques: he has a precise ideology. I no longer want to make music for music’s sake. We have to speak out, and music is a means like any other: some people march, others put up posters. The way Charlie Haden did it is absolutely fantastic. It’s a lesson for us all as nobody had done anything like it before, except Shepp, in one of his first records [Fire Music], about Malcolm—but that seemed kind of weak to me, in the end…" Asked if Haden’s album was not bound to spark political consciousness only among those already possessing it, Thollot answered negatively. "This record caused a lot of controversy among musicians," he added. "They sensed that their music was only about music, whereas Charlie’s was about music but also about something else."
Jacques Thollot, Quand le son devient aigu, jeter la girafe à la mer, Futura GER 24, 1971, LP.
Jacques Thollot’s first LP was recorded and released in 1971. It appeared on Gérard Terronès's Futura imprint. Although it was not an album of drum solos, Thollot was the only musician featured. He alternated between percussions, organ, piano, and other sound sources. "I had started working on it alone at home, with next to nothing: a microphone and overdubs," Thollot said of his Girafe solo in a 1996 Libération article. "I recorded up to 200 takes for a one-minute piece. When I played excerpts for people, nobody really saw what to do with them. In a way, it made me think that the music was self-sufficient. Everything was very clearly laid out in my mind. I could have made a dozen Girafes at the time." The album was reissued by Souffle continu in 2019.
All sources in French, all translations are my own.