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North Mississippi hill country blues. This musical style is the most African way of blues, and very close to traditional and ethnic music from Africa. It is even close to our French folkloric stuff. Most of this music comes from deep countries, played by people with hard lives. It’s like a univer- sal blues of poor people living and work- ing in the country.”
The trio released their first album, Hypnotic Wheels, in 2014. Their second album, Muddy Gurdy, manages to deepen the connection between the music of these three French musicians and North Mississippi hill country blues by reaching out, collaborating, and sharing their vision face-to-face with practitioners of the craft.
Writer, producer, and percussionist, Marc Glomeau has form when it comes to involvement with music from around the world. He founded Black Chantilly, one of France’s foremost Afro-Cuban jazz bands with whom he toured for over ten years. Over his career he has collaborated with world music musicians, artists from the jazz scene, and has worked on various innovative music projects.
“As a percussionist, I have listened to
and played different music from different cultures all my life,” he explained. “I always thought that if you are a musician you must keep an open mind, and if you do, you can play different music as you can talk different languages. Music and rhythm are better ways to meet and com- municate with a lot of cultures… For me, playing music is not copying any stuff, it’s trying to understand what it means to play this music – where it comes from, who has played this music before. After this first step you have to wonder what you can do with this, with your own history, your own culture, in order to be yourself and express yourself… I think that is the main direction we share in Hypnotic Wheels and Muddy Gurdy. We all try to be ourselves. We have learned a lot about life and music with all the people we met in Como (musicians or not), and we’ll never forget this.”
Blues guitarist and singer Tia Gout- tebel started playing guitar when she was just six years old. “After a few years I dis- covered blues music through some seven- ties bands who were deeply inspired by this music… So, I learned how to play on my guitar, helped by the recordings I had from old bluesmen.” Gouttebel forged her own path with “blues from the Delta, Chicago, Texas, North Mississippi hill country, west coast, New Orleans, funk, soul, gospel, etc … you can create your own style if you don’t try to copy, if you try to be yourself, fed with what you listen to, what you live.”
By 2002 she had formed the band
Patient Wolves, playing covers, “like some Chicago blues, Texas blues.” They worked festivals, toured France, Europe, then eventually the US. So, Gouttebel is no stranger to the States, having already shared the stage with musicians including electric bass player Leroy Hodges and gui- tar player Kirk Fletcher. Encounters such as
these have had a “huge” impact. “You just have to exchange, enjoy playing and learn from them. The story of the blues is heavy, it comes from people who really suffered. You have to respect the history of where it comes from, that is a part of the under- standing of the blues.”
With this background it comes as no surprise that it was Gouttebel who select- ed which songs were to be recorded with each of the Mississippi musicians, as Glomeau explains. “Tia did the selection and we worked on it in trio before leaving to create our own vision of the tunes.” The selection was inspired. One standout is their version of Help The Poor, sparked by Gouttebel’s long-held love of the song since she heard it on BB King’s album Live At The Regal. “Marco had the idea to play it as a shuffle, not as the original,” she recalled. “I took my open tuning guitar in D minor, which is really different from BB King’s sound and guitar. That tuning gives another sound for the song, and the cher- ry on the cake is the hurdy-gurdy and all the different sounds this instrument can make, very massive – sometimes like a big body. I like the idea that we made it differ- ent. You can’t be as good as him in his own interpretation; we made it as Hypnotic Wheels’ sauce.”
“Tia had chosen That Girl Is Bad by Cedric Burnside,” Glomeau continued. “Cedric told us before recording that he composed this song with his young broth- er Cody. Cody was a rapper and had passed away a few years ago (at 26 years due to a heart attack). Cedric was very touched by this choice and happy to record it with our sound! You can listen to Cedric talking about this on the CD.”
W
hen Hypnotic Wheels travelled to North Mis- sissippi they took Yan- nick Demaison with them “to make a docu-
mentary of this unique musical trip.” It was important in every way “to capture the most authentic and spontaneous music we can play,” and it was on this basis that they chose the artists with whom wanted to work. “Because they are all descendants of the most influen- tial figures of the North Mississippi hill country musicians. They are all very tal- ented, they are the future of this music.”
In Mississippi they found a “place to live in the country close to Como. We took time to meet the people, talking, record- ing with a very simple system (one laptop, eight mics, eight-input preamp). One shot, no overdubs. We perfectly knew that this project had to be authentic because this music has to be authentic.” And central to capturing that authenticity was catching the sounds and the atmosphere as they unfolded. For the band, sound engineer Pierre Bianchi was the obvious choice for this. “He is very experienced, professional, one of the best in France, but he has a teenage enthusiasm for the music, a total adaptability, respect, and a real artistic vision of his job.”
“W
hen Marc and Tia told me about this crazy project of the Hypnotic Wheels trio going
to Mississippi to record with some of the biggest names of the blues, I was in right away,” confessed Bianchi. “I am a field sound engineer… I love to escape the anti- septic atmosphere of studios, and never hesitate to travel with my portable materi- al to the most unusual places.”
“Efficiency goes along with simplici-
ty,” he pointed out about his field record- ing. “I needed to choose a set-up well adapted to the situations I would be con- fronted with. I needed something simple, very reliable and not cumbersome. So, eight mics is enough to capture the essence of the music.”
“The first day we recorded it was with Cedric Burnside,” he recounted. “We were settled in an old wooden, and very dusty, house. I put everyone in a circle. The musi- cians observed each other, listened to each other, were attentive to the dialogue hap- pening across from them. The sound is totally compact because it’s very balanced. If you don't hear your neighbour, it is because you are too loud. The band played. It sounded really good right away. Even though I was not quite ready yet, technologically speaking, I started record- ing. The best take is often the one we did- n't get. At the end of the song, everybody was happy. They really had a blast. So, when I told them that I had recorded everything, they were really happy.”
“The guys decided to go for a second take. I went to Cedric and asked him if he wanted some of his voice in the monitor that I’d just put at his feet. His answer was just fantastic: ‘Really? You can do that?’ Amazing, he gave so much without even hearing himself. I was astounded.”
The detail of the recording is treated with similar respect on the final product. The sleeve notes on the album explain where each track was recorded and who with. Bianchi’s found and gathered sounds connect the tracks and introduce the mood. “Our sound engineer decided to capture a lot of ambient sounds from the places we were,” Glomeau told me. “He didn’t know exactly how he could use them.” The tiny but incredibly atmospher- ic Tia In The Rocking Chair shows the power of those natural recordings. Nature’s drone, the creaking chair, the dis- embodied human hum. He found the per- fect use for them.
“We expected that we would play this music on stage everywhere with the same spirit that you found in this record,” Glomeau explained. “The message is always the same, music is to get people together, it’s not for division. Our job is to break frontiers; we are musical migrants.”
Find out for yourself with Muddy
Gurdy’s Glory Glory Hallelujah on the fRoots 68 compilation with this issue.
hypnotic-wheels.com F
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