François Tusques & Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra - Après La Marée Noire / Vers Une Musique Bretonne Nouvelle

Souffle Continu Records - LP

France, 2025

Celtic / Jazz / Free

After reissuing the life-affirming Le Musichien, Le Souffle Continu further delves into the catalogue of François Tusques's Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra, with the high-quality reissue of two flamboyant recordings. 

Released on Le Chant du Monde in 1979, a year after the tragic shipwreck of the oil tanker Amoco Cadiz resulting in the largest oil spill at the time, Après La Marée Noire, is not an elegiac album, mourning the death of thousands of animals, but rather offers perspectives of renascence for Bretagne, highly traumatized by the ecological disaster and its economical and political aftermaths. Like Le Musichien, Tusques's fusion of modal jazz and folk music music is fueled by joy and freedom-seeking - no pun intended.

Bringing their many influences - Afro-Cuban Jazz, Thelonious Monk, Pharoah Sanders - into Bretagne territories, Tusques and his ensemble of close collaborators (Michel Marre, Jo Maka, Carlo Andreu, Adolf Winkler) sets a relatively blank sheet for local musicians (Bombarde and Biniou players Jean Louis Le Vallegant, Gaby Kerdoncuff, Philippe Lestrat and Diaouled Ar Menez's  bassist Tanguy Ledoré) to express their own musical bretonnité. 

The 1970's and 1980's were highly fruitful times for experiments in jazz fusion for many musicians from Brittany, looking for ways to reinvigorate folk music and eventually to reach new audiences;  Après La Marée Noire / Vers Une Musique Bretonne Nouvelle keeps both promises: not only is the music recorded by this one-time band genuinely new by the time of its release, it can hardly be compared to anything else release in the years following its recording. When it comes to new audiences, from my experience, it's a record that mainly found its way onto the shelves of spiritual jazz enthusiasts, outside of Britanny.

It's a distant Breton cousin of le Musichien, but the affiliation is nonetheless quite easy to hear, not only musically-speaking, but spiritually too. The band vigorously affirms the same political desires than on other Intercommunal releases: the advent of a new Internationalist, pan-regionalist, united by an insurrectional joy. Incredible music, reissued as a splendid gatefold LP, as one should expect from Souffle Continu. (M/M - wholesale: shops, contact us)