Claude Barthélémy ‎– Jaune et Encore (FRA, 1979, new wav rip available)

I mentioned this record some time back in another post (sadly I don't remember the context, such is my middle-aged cognitive decline) and I pulled it out again to remind myself of how well written it is.  You will hear some really ingenious electric guitar spilling over a crashing background of keyboards flattening out unusual chords, bluesing it out in harder rockier numbers, jazzy acoustic inflections on masterful piano and synthesizer patterns... a good sample is the track Café here:





Notice the wonderful ending, that eschews the tonic (D) for the 6th chord, B flat 7th, giving it that unfinished, suspenseful feeling, like a short story without an ending.  It really amazes me how many worlds of narrative a simple song like this can dictate if you let your imagination go, there is more information in one three-minute track than a novel sometimes if the music is as good as this.  When I compare the two artforms of literature and music, I'm always surprised to see from the sizes of files how much less dense writing is compared to music, an album recorded without loss will occupy about 300 mb, whereas a full novel is a mere 3-10 mb if saved in a pdf format as opposed to word (one can debate whether word has lost some information or not).  And yet reading is also time-dependent just as music is (and unlike visual arts), but the elaboration of its content in terms of ideas and the thought processes inside the mind is also not to be minimized, though something similar occurs when listening to music.  It's hard to really come to grips with this problem, personally, I do prefer music to literature (and the other arts) so I'm biased from the start.

This gentleman was very productive after this record, as you can see from his discog.  I have heard all these albums until 1991 at which time my interest always rapidly falls off a cliff, and I can certainly recommend Forest One and Moderne (which amazingly came out on CD!), after which the compositional quality beings to seriously decline.  But Jaune et Encore is without a doubt his best work, full of the creative crazy energy of youth (he was 23 years old at the time).  Also notice the luminaries that accompany him here, which include Henri Texier, Michel Ripoche (you can instantly detect his original style when you hear the electric violin-- we know him so well, on the track "Helio-police")...