Petr Dorůžka & Ken Hunt – World Music

The musician who refuses to be fashionable

1. 9. 2024 | Rubriky: Articles,Interviews

Denis Péan is the guiding spirit of the French group Lo’Jo. In October, the band presents their new album Feuilles Fauves on tour, including a Prague concert.

After 42 years and 14 albums, Lo’Jo still sound like a group of visionaries from another world. Their roots go back to the punk rock era, but you can’t hear it in their music. Also, Lo’Jo is untouched by French musical stereotypes. If you hear a chanson track, it’s shifted into a distorted Tom Waits perspective. Musically, Lo’Jo was inspired by trumpeter Don Cherry, psychedelia, experimental music by groups like Magma, African genres, but these influences are more ideological than stylistic. The group’s sound cannot be described using routine clichés, everything here works differently. But one thing grabs you right away: the voices of two North African singers, the El Mourid sisters. They are playful, affectionate, sensual and yet laconic. They create the perfect counterweight to the narrative vocals of Denis Péan. The female voices frame the band’s sound perfectly, but unfortunately to the listener, they often quickly disappear, leading the Guardian critic Robin Denselow to note: “The only disappointment is that the sisters aren’t given a larger role. They provide some gloriously edgy backing.” However, it is up to the painter to use the chosen color only sparingly and thereby add meaning to it.

Denis Péan accompanies himself on the Indian harmonium, an instrument that deserves separate study. Nico, the female singer on the Velvet Underground’s first album, was responsible for the parallel life of the Indian harmonium in the West.

“History is a book made of porcelain,” sings Péan on the Transe de Papier album. His texts are unique metaphors based on the art of abbreviation. His language was inspired by Apollinaire, Baudelaire and Nietzsche, as well as books from the local radical bookstore La T©te en Bas, which later became the target of extremist violence. The band’s instrumental pillar is the strained melodic strokes of violinist Richard Bourreau. He met Péan at the conservatory in Angers, a city of 150,000, halfway between Paris and Brittany, where they both studied Baroque music. In addition, musicians were attracted by styles from all distant and mysterious corners of the world. From Bourreau’s violin we hear tango and Irish music as well as folk styles from Eastern Europe.

Denis and I have been preparing for the following interview since spring 2024. When I identified his face in the audience at the Babel Music festival in Marseille at the end of March, he confirmed that the interview would take place, but by email. I agreed, knowing that email conversations lacked interaction, which this time was balanced by the content. Péan answered laconically, but the group’s history offers stories that, like the “butterfly effect”, had a deep impact on later musical development. The crucial link was the connection between Lo’Jo and the then-unknown Justin Adams. He became their producer 5 years before he became famous as Robert Plant’s guitarist. Adams clarified this little-known story when he performed at the Respect festival in Prague in June 2024. Late 1990’s, Lo’Jo were invited to a concert in Bamako, the capital of Mali, and logically took Adams, their producer, with them. In Bamako, they were contacted by a person who introduced them to the Tinariwen, a group of desert nomads playing electric guitars. Both Lo’Jo and Adams were fascinated by their music. The resulting event was the first edition of the Festival au Désert near the border with Algeria, which took place in January 2001. The Prime Minister of Mali, four ambassadors, and representatives of the UN visited. Government Toyotas welcomed the nomadic Touaregs on camels. Later in summer, the first album by Tinariwen was released, with Lo’Jo and Adams participating. Not many people remember now, that the phenomenon of “desert blues” was partly invented by a French band who refuse to be fashionable.

What kind of music did you grow up with?

My parents weren’t interested in the arts. We didn’t have music in the family’s house.
Also, there was no traditional music in my native area. My education was silence. When I became a teenager, an older guy in my village gave me my first musical initiation with seventies Anglophone psychedelic music.

You played a bassoon in the old days – what made you choose such an unusual instrument?

Because of the introduction of Le Sacre du Printemps by Stravinsky and the Vivaldi Concerto for bassoon.

And when did you pick up an Indian harmonium? The best known artist who used that instrument was Nico. Is any influence from her?

I saw Nico solo in concert with Indian harmonium at the end of the seventies, but I began to play this instrument when I met Indian musicians from Rajasthan.

How did Don Cherry influence you? What did you ask him after his concert in Théatre d’Angers in 1978 ?

In my native town Angers, we had a cultural centre where jazz musicians performed. I had a chance to listen to Carla Bley, Miles Davis, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Lounge Lizards, etc. I became addicted to Afro-American culture, not only to music to but also to thoughts about politics, slave history and civic rights. When I met Don Cherry, I was so shy, but I felt we shared the same soul and I think he was a visionary and that he felt this too. Don was a pioneer in the way he mixed jazz with traditional Indian, African and European sounds.

How many languages do you speak?

I’m specifically very interested in French literature and poetry, but I compose some songs in Spanish, English or Creole.

And how many languages can you understand at a limited level?

I feel close too to the Creole language of the Réunion Island. It sounds very rhythmical and musical, it’s a very creative form of a new language of survival for the slaves.
I used to write songs (especially girls’ chorus) with an imaginary “Lo’jo” language made of sounds more than meaning.

If I remember well, in the past you made a song in Wolof. Was it more an adventure or a project based on linguistic research?

Yes, and pther songs in the Dogon language or Lingala. That adventure in Africa gave us something very precious about music, humanity and philosophy.

We’ve met at Babel Music. Did any of the bands impress you? My favourites were: Belugueta (Occitania) and Sanam (Lebanon).

I liked the very emotional Palestinian singer Christine Zayed, also Belugueta. And Alostmen were so powerful.

Do the Lo’Jo members still live in a common house outside Angers, in the French countryside? How many people with family members in total?

We were around fifteen people living in the Lo’jo house where we received many musicians coming from all around the world, especially from West Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Once you said: I go to prisons, psychiatric hospitals, to the schools where I play. So Lo’Jo did a concert in French prison, like Johnny Cash in Folsom Prison?

Yes, we play in prisons, but my most emotional musical experience was playing for babies in a centre for orphaned children. Unusual places to play in are a challenge for creativity.

The style of your music is not exactly French chanson, yet there are some common links: focus on the lyrics, deep yet hidden emotionality, and a high level of sophistication. Were you influenced by any chanson singers?

Not really, I have respect for different artists, but I follow my own way and experiment my own form of language and singing.

Often Tom Waits is mentioned as a related artist. Can you comment on this?

People have their own references, it’s possible that a Russian guy will compare me to Vladimir Vysotsky or an African guy to Boubacar Traoré.

Tell me about the books you write. Was any of them translated?

It’s poetry, my experience of life, games with language, the esoteric perspective, musical flow. There’s no translation, except for some songs. It’s perhaps very difficult to translate.

Justin Adams produced some of your albums, years before he became famous as Robert Plant’s guitarist. How did you find him? Or was it the other way?

In the early nineties, when our album Fils de Zamal came out, the artistic director of the label was Andy Morgan, a friend of Justin – they played together in their first punk group when they were teenagers. Andy wanted us to meet Justin, who was just out of a painful break-up with the musician Jah Wobble and wanted to bounce back from it by producing albums. Years later, Andy became the first English manager of Tinariwen.

Actually, one of the major points in Lo’Jo’s biography was the meeting with Tinariwen. Do you remember how it happened?

Lo’jo organized the Festival au Désert at the beginning of the century, in the little town called Kidal. We’ve met the musicians of the legendary band Tinariwen, and we recorded their first album Radio Tisdas Sessions in a dusty radio station. We introduced the band in Europe and the United States. We became great friends and still are now.

What was the main quality of the band you liked?

The lyrics, I took part of a translation team for the album Aman Iman. The hypnotic power of rhythm, the sensual atmosphere of sound.

Justin Adams was also involved. Did you introduce the band to him, or was it the other way?

Before this festival, Justin was the artistic producer for 2 albums of Lo’jo and we even brought him with us to Mali. We met Tinariwen together in the Adrar of Ifoghas, near to Kidal in north Mali at the end of 2000.
You toured France with them in 1998, and 3 years later you helped them to create the Festival au Désert. How did you find the funding? And did you invest your own money, or just your time and energy?

Lo’jo produced the festival. We carried sound and light equipment from France.
We had some financial help coming from the famous French street theatre festival “Châlon dans la rue”. It was a crazy improvisation.

The name Lo’Jo sounds great in English and in French too. Maybe that is the definition of what these 2 languages have in common. Or maybe you have another explanation?

If I spoke Arabic or Czech, I would write songs in Arabic or Czech.

Your new album is called Feuilles Fauves. Can you explain the name for non-French speakers? I tried and got this: Leaves gone wild. Is this close to what you mean?

“Feuilles” is the vegetal part: leaves, also for humans, the piece of paper to write on. “Fauves” is the animal part, also the wild part of human.

The singers Yamina and Nadia Nid El Mourid are rather Berber, or Kabyle, than Arab? Are they from the Algerian Sahara or Atlas mountains?

Their parents came from the Atlas mountains, the Algerian side from the mother and the Moroccan part from the father. They are Kabyle/Berber, not Arab.

Robin Denselow in The Guardian calls for more space for Yamina and Nadia. Can you imagine them as solo singers with Denis Péan providing background harmonies?

That’s exactly the case on this new album.

For The Quietus you said: “I was obsessed with not trying to be fashionable, I didn’t want to do what other people were doing.” 15 years before that, Magma took a similar path, in ideas, yet in a very different style. Did you listen to Magma before starting Lo’Jo?

When I was a teenager, I saw Magma in concert. It was a very deep experience for me. There’s nothing similar to Magma.