Rabble Without A Cause
Wednesday September 5th, 2012 with Bernard Stepien
Summer Jazz – part I: French drummer, pianist, accordionist, poet and off-beat politician Bernard Lubat

If you are in France and jazzman Bernard Lubat turns up on a concert poster, don’t even start to think! Just go, you won’t be disappointed. Bernard Lubat has been cultivating the concept of one man show for a while. Fully proficient on four instruments (drums, piano, accordion, voice), his art is probably focused on yet two more extensions: poetry and circus. Since all of his music is sawn with poetry that can turn into acid political satire targeted at all the political spectrum and that all of that is in French or more precisely an extended French where words, like Jazz chords are carefully altered to reveal their true meaning or sometimes exactly their opposite all of that with the appropriate rhythm effects that one could expect from a percussionist, you may be first at a loss. However, the circus component should break the language barrier at once. During most of the concert I was wondering what the three large frying pans hanging above the grand piano were for. At one point, the revelation came. After having thrown a batch of ping pong balls in the piano that were jumping all over the place to create both a visual effect (the circus part) and random sounds (the music part) (the composition was appropriately called “et que ça saute!”), the frying pans revealed their function. Lubat had a typical but bigger than usual toy dart gun with suction cups. At the very appropriate moment, while un-suspiciously playing piano, Lubat would fire his gun and the percussive impact of the arrow would of course produce a sound on the frying pan at exactly the right point in time in the improvisation of a standard including the right pitch. I forgot which tune it was he was playing, but I think it was Stella by Starlight, a favorite worn out standard commonly played at any jam-session. The French crowds love that kind of complex combinations of art and casual events. The venue was of course packed with people having driven sometimes up to two hours to get to this venue. For the iconoclasts, Lubat defines himself as an Amusicien (Amusician) which after much thinking could be interpreted in two opposite ways: an anti-musician or an amuse-ician. Your choice! Note: the very long, winding and complex syntax errors laden phrases of the above text are intended to somehow render the complexity of Lubat’s both personality and art. This summer I had the luck to catch Lubat at the most unusual venue one could think: Le Théatre d’Ardoise on the island of Oléron in France. That island is not known for its Jazz festivals like the French Riviera. The local demand for Jazz is low there. But artistic director Jean-Marc Chailloleau, also owner of the oyster processing basins around the theatre and co-founder of a pirate radio station where he also hosted a Jazz program in the ‘80s, has a different idea: program a festival spread over the two months French people take their extensive vacation that a typical Nortel Networks manager still don’t understand today with a very mixed content ranging from folk music to Jazz but always with the combination music, theatre, and high-end gastronomy food. This is not to mention the venue itself, an artificial roman theatre made of shale slates that are usually used to attract oyster larvae in the ocean. This symbiosis between Jazz, art, nature and architecture should land him a UNESCO world heritage label soon unless he stays too quiet. http://www.letheatredardoise.com Lubat can be viewed on: http://vimeo.com/9229754