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Some people, throughout centuries, have crossed Europe, singing and playing various instruments, never claiming territory, if only the freedom to cross them all, borrowing their musical vocabulary and building up a treasure in which others would be able to dip into. As time goes by, music evolves according to the musicians’imagination. Indeed, the oral tradition allows this type of magic consisting in improvising, ornating, and making the music one’s own. This way of tackling it particularly fits those who haven’t had any cultural heritage, and who, though knowing their origins, haven’t been brought up with traditions.
This is the case with the Bratsch musicians, whose parents or grandparents have emigrated either from abroad to France, or from the province to Paris, and who, throughout the years, made their own music using the heritage mentioned previously. Then, the writing, a reflection of the band’s collective expression, is put into place, creating a new music, which Bratsch calls pre-traditional, being unable to play it traditionally straight away, and likely to become one day the basis for a tradition. This album recalls of course thoughts and feelings inspired by the two implacable and common realities of life and death, but above all, the expression of the original “all that”, painful, often happy manner that everyone has to tame the reality of their condition: what do we do in the meantime? The answer may be hidden behind a little travelling note, telling a lasting story, playing with time, making fun of delays, where music and friendship can be discovered.
The musicians know all too well how difficult it is to create an ensemble or an orchestra that can become a proper “band”, whose members manage to find the necessary complicity to create “a sound”. It is quite a mysterious and often fragile thing. The improbable gathering of odd personalities, which naturally led Bratsch to develop a happy eclecticism, is probably mysterious, but not fragile. This group intuitively started from bases close enough to be able to indefinitely fetch inspiration made out of understanding and pleasure. These foundations are those of oral tradition, in the way they have to capture the music as they capture the audience. The Bratsch musicians have stayed close to story-telling. Because they practice, in other circumstances, an avant-garde music, doesn’t mean they forget the evening party music type.
The Bratsch musicians cultivate the dream-like strength of tradition but play with the rule. They have no liking for definitive form, they like to be free to play as they wish, to mix all sorts of influences and to introduce their own style.
Nomadic in their music, and for a long time at ease with the modernity of world travel, they mix, with joy, urban music and exotic romances, strange compositions and variety, -or not quite so-, screams and confidences, humour and seriousness.
If at the beginning, Bratsch moves back to traditions from the Balkans, its use of jazz makes sense, as well as its modern way to contemplate certain melodic developments, some treatments of sounds or screamed tunes. It happens to be coming from a good understanding of traditional music in which you keep finding these types of expressive tricks. Bratsch doesn’t fail from reminding us , with purpose, that musics from the East still have, just like jazz, a primordial quality, forgotten in our society: improvisation.
Happiness of playing in context: the music adapts itself to its surroundings and to the audience’s reactions, provoking it if needs be.
These musics called “gipsy”, - it is true that the musicians, often gipsy themselves, who play them, bring the magnificence of their playful virtuosity and of their vertiginous phrasing-, give out a sort of “blues” mixed with energy. You can never tell if they are happy or sad, they’re both. They express with great strength the duality of feelings . Bratsch, mixing the raw side with the light side –with a hint of tenderness-, has made it its specialty.
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