Over the years Chalot has created a complex drum and percussion system including 5 pedal-operated orchestral bass-drums, each of a different diameter and tuning, used in different ways according to the tonality of the music. Chalot is a melodic, expressive drummer, using his instrument to narrate as well as to underpin the story of each piece. With an unusually high seating position, he can play polyrhythmically with the two halves of his body, as a tabla player plays independently with each hand.
It was around the fireplace of an old farmhouse, hidden in the foothills of the Pyrenees, that we got together for the first time on New Year’s Day 2004. We ate, talked and played together. Three musical nomads, not lacking in experience or ideas, each with a stubborn streak and each used to being the initiator or leader in musical situations. How do you build a trio with three leaders? Well, a kind of balance gradually developed, a triangle of creative tension. Long sessions followed, each Friday, at our house, or at Vincent’s, whose caravan and practice-room is on a hilltop with a majestic view of the Mountains. We began to make live recordings of this music - which remained, and remains, mysterious even to us – with Gerard at the console as well as on the bass. Suppertimes were spent around the table with Noelle, my wife, or with Veronique, Vincent’s sister and a well-known musician (www.veziana.net) herself, consuming Gerard’s homemade bread, Vincent’s taboulé, and country wine. After each of those first concerts, at the St Gaudens Festival, Art’Cade in Sainte Croix, the Mandala in Toulouse, we began to understand our own music better, our path became clearer, and the trio more tightly knit. This summer, the journey continues in the company of Aelita, Queen of Mars. (See below.) (David)
In Russia, newly Soviet, Lenin has just died and Stalin has not yet taken control. There is a brief flowering of relative artistic freedom during this period under a regime that itself retains some vestiges of bohemianism. Pasternak, Stravinsky, Chostakovitch, Prokofiev – who are destined to suffer, or leave, later under Stalin – all have their first successes during this time. In this euphoric post-war atmosphere, Jacov Protazanov, a big name in pre-revolutionary cinema, better known at the time than Eisenstein, and by all accounts a bourgeois intellectual, returns from exile in Paris at the invitation of the authorities to make a Soviet blockbuster based on a book by Alexi Tolstoy, able to compete with foreign films in Russian cinemas. The result was so popular that large numbers of girls born in 1924 were named ‘Aelita’ after the young Martian queen. It is an inspired fusion of genres (science-fiction, melodrama, burlesque, quasi-documentary realism) and decors (the corrupt but sensual and balletic decadence of the Martian scenes, in costume worthy of Dr Who, the poverty and desperation of civil-war refugees) and its revolutionary message (it is a film made to order) cannot hide a vein of ironic ambiguity characteristic of Protazanov (can one really order a film?)
This rich heterogeneity is the challenge and the attraction of this film to the musicians of Zalmoxis Trio, who, through their resolutely modern and experimental music, offer a 21st century view of a modernist film from the dawn of cinema.
