Petites Annonces, France 1981 (by request)

Here's an album that was requested not so long ago which I dug up and then had to leave on the back burner due to the series of American posts followed by the Japanese ones and the great Masahiko Satoh.

As you can tell from the cover, perhaps very unfamiliar to anyone under the age of 30 (aka a so-called (oddly enough) millennial, the term petites annonces refers to the classified section of the newspaper.  This is where, unbelievably to the aforementioned 20-year-olds, people had to type and write up their own personal ad to send by mail to the newspaper to be published, which they had to wait weeks for, or even more astonishingly, they would call up the newspaper from their home phone and verbally describe (to another live human being! in real time! in real life!) what they wanted written-- for example, they would say, "I need someone to mow my lawn, preferably from the local neighbourhood" (uber didn't perform this service for you back then).  They would also leave a home phone number as a communication.  That's a phone that you don't carry around with you, in fact, it's physically stuck inside your house.  It doesn't move.  Doesn't leave the house.  Doesn't use Uber to go out.  Like grandma who has Parkinsons.  Incredible, right?  Btw, for the really young folks, a newspaper is a (physical) piece of paper with news on it you receive on your doorstep, and, believe it or not, this really happens-- sorry I meant this really happened, once upon a time.  (You get it on your doorstep, because it doesn't come via internet instantly.  Someone has to throw it onto your doorstep, usually at 6 AM, thereby waking you up, and the kids too, when they hit the front door.  It's not Uber.  It's a guy who drove around the neighbourhood, in a car, throwing newspapers at peoples' homes.  Not delivering food to them.  Just delivering the news.)  And furthermore, the news was reliably true.  It wasn't half fake information.  How did we know that?  Well, we didn't, but people tried really hard to make sure it was true.  Who were these people?  Well, they were called journalists.  They went around looking for things that happened, for real.  They didn't just make things up like you guys do in school, or look on wikipedia.org and copy and paste.  They had a job where they looked for things that really happened, not made-up things for amusement, or things that instagram, facebook, twitter, were paid to write.  We believed those newspapers.  Why? Well, because if you don't believe anything, you might as well be living in a fascist dystopian conspiracists' reality (which, today, we call Trumpworld) where the news is made by snapchat, Tiktok, and Whatsapp.  I guess you kids know that things are true on youtube because real people are doing really important, newsworthy things, like swallowing laundry detergent pods.  I mean, it must be so so hard for you younger folks to understand this.  It must be so weird.  Especially the part about information written on paper, that people trusted.  We didn't even rate them with stars, like Uber drivers.  Not even once in a while when we were bored.  We never did.  And then you actually had to turn the pages, to go from one story to another, and move your whole arm to do it, not just your thumb, right.  People had to turn their necks to read that stuff.  Btw, paper is this hard flat thing that was made from trees, it was white, and you put ink on it to read.  Can you believe it?  Yes, the ink is like those multiple tattoos on your body, you know how you had 20 of them by the time you were 20 years old and they say all these really deep things that you've never read?  You know, or like those pictures of Justin Bieber just after he vomited that you put on your butt?   Btw, trees are those big brown things with green leaves next to you, if you look to the right of your phone over there, not the ones with the electric wires, those are transmission poles.  They make the oxygen you breathe, not amazon.com and Jeff Bezos.  Although you can probably ship it through amazon, if you have a prime membership.  You can give oxygen a five star rating for keeping you alive.  (And give trees a 'like' too, they really need it, much more than Uber.)  Alive is like when you're looking at your phone, you know, like when you're taking selfies in the bathroom mirror to post instantly on instagram, and you're not a bot, or a robot.
Can you imagine????  omigod, you millenials...

Now for the older folks, the classifieds have disappeared of course and were at one time replaced by craigslist, which became taken over completely with ads for local prostitutes, thereby being replaced in turn by kijiji, which is now over-run by thieves and crooks who will do anything to steal what you are selling, the latest scam using fake certified checks-- you know those checks that in the old days were impossible to fake...   Yes, it's really quite amazing how technological progress has improved our society.  Just look at the evolution of porn, once an underground thing that was completely hidden from everyone, especially children, for example magazines were kept high up out of their lines of sight in corner stores, then it became mainstream in the mildest manner with Playboy, etc., which was replaced by videos, you had to rent those in a seedy store where kids were not allowed, which was replaced by pay per use sites where you had to have a credit card, presumably children didn't yet have those back then, which led today to completely free internet porn available to everyone, even 2-year olds.  In this way now a ten year old girl can easily watch the most sick and perverse intercourse, if she wanted to, with complete freedom, with zero restrictions, in her bedroom.

Yes, the progress of our society is truly a miracle.

Anyways, back to the music, which is 40 years old, way older than a millenial, thank god.  The opener is quite auspicious without a doubt, unlike what one would have said about the decade-starting year of 2010:





Its title means one measure, two tempos and three movements, obviously.  So it starts quite strong out of the gate.  We have progressive fusion ideas chock-full. Thereafter a track called Experimental really gives you an interesting sound, perhaps derived from library tracks like Teddy Lasry's, with an ostinato on piano plus bass and swirling spacey synths and an acoustic piano improvising about:





Unfortunately, side b is more in line with basic, simple jazz, and disappoints the further you go-- a bit like the way the old newspapers transformed into facebook's fake news and network tv became (nausea) youtube.

Information can be found here.  Note that the guitarist is Voindriot, who has appeared before on this blog, here and here.  The compositions are collective.  To my complete shock, a very familiar keyboardist appears on certain tracks, Cyrille Verdeaux.  Everyone should be familiar with his work.
At any rate, we have here a beautiful side one.  Enjoy it, along with your kijiji, 5-G or perhaps 8-G smartphone, and tiktok fake news.

(I know what tiktok is, that's just a joke. And apologies to anyone insulted by the above rant.)