After releasing his new solo album, Between the Lines, on japanese label Flaü, Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven will make a Japan tour from may 29th to june 11th.
For nearly 15 years, I’ve been collecting music in my drawers. Bits of melodies, half-finished pieces, a few chords thrown hastily onto a sheet of paper. It was necessary for someone at the other end of the world (for Belgium, Japan is at the other end of the world) to ask me to release a CD there, for me to put together all these musical bits and pieces and give them, at last, a shape and a face. If this music has been in my drawers for so long, it may be because here in Belgium, I didn’t know where it belonged. Not jazz, nor what one may call contemporary music, nor pop, nor chanson… Maybe a bit of everything, maybe something else. It seems to me that by releasing a CD so far from home, these questions would be allowed to fade and that it would be enough to say that it is all simply music, my music. More precisely, this is the music which comes to me most effortlessly. At the risk of giving in to certain clichés, I must say that this is the music which comes to me as I am walking down the street, or absent-mindedly driving in my car. Music which surfaces naturally, without being summoned. And it is so irresistible, because it brings me back to my adolescence, and even my childhood, during which I have had the good fortune of being swept away by music, which was a living part of me, haunting me, relentlessly calling upon me. At the time I was not aware that to live thus, in a world filled with sounds, was extraordinary. I believed it to be the norm. Later, adulthood attempts to persuade us that reality is altogether something far more serious. Today, it is this music which has become a stronghold against the commonplace banal reality of the world. This is why this album may very well be the most personal I have ever made. Because it reaches what is most natural within myself. It springs from my oldest emotions, the most mysterious, the most unconscious ones. Although recorded with a certain urgency, a great calmness seems to emanate from this music. Much like the pervasive longing for a lost world to which music allows, from time to time, an entrance, a door to an elsewhere which remains forever elusive. This music attempts to grasp behind the world’s façade something else, which our grown-up eyes can no longer see. It attempts to read between the lines what is not said but which we can perceive if only we know how to listen.
Between the lines…
Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven
Last release at SUB ROSA label: Fleeting music, that is the second part of Incidental music previously released.
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SEVEN FLEETING COMPOSITIONS FOR PIANO. MEMORY AND IMPROVISATION. A MYSTERIOUS PARADOX. THE IMPROVISATION FLIES AWAY AND THE MUSICAL SCORE STAYS. HERE IS SOMETHING PRESERVED FROM THE IRREVERSIBLE FLOW OF TIME, WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE LEFT ANY TRACE EXCEPT IN THE MEMORY OF A FEW LISTENERS.
Rather the flight of a bird that goes by and leaves no trace,
Than the passing of an animal, which leaves a reminder on the ground.
A bird goes by and is forgotten, and so it should be.
An animal, when it’s not there anymore and so of no use,
Shows it was there, which is no use at all.
Memory betrays Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature is not Nature.
What was is nothing, and to remember is to not see.
Pass, bird, pass, and teach me to pass!
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Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
A wind passes very lightly
And goes away, always very lightly.
And I don’t know what I think
And I don’t want to know.
