Les Yeux Noirs & the press
Press kit Best Oyf
Les Yeux Noirs, founded in 1992 by Eric and Olivier Slabiak, here release their very first ‘Best of’ selection, in the form of a double CD combining their first-ever compilation with a live recording.
At a time when their Yiddish ensemble has ‘come of age’, the age of ‘the young girl with dark eyes who
came down from the Urals with the wind in her hand’ – of whom their friend Philippe Léotard sang in 1998 in the heartrending Oï Tzigane, here placed at the start of the compilation – this first opportunity to take stock is an important and logically much-awaited stage in their long and eventful career.
Live - OPRE SCENA
The live performance comes from a Radio France concert recorded in Aix-les-Bains. It catches the group in 2007. Maturity and majesty embrace during a recital to the grandeur of all those magical places where their violins have ceaselessly grown intoxicated and taken flight for almost two decades, in turn Slavonic and Gypsy, Romanian or Macedonian, at once revellers, storytellers, magic spells, whips, suitors, horsemen... They are surrounded, always, by a fine band that moves with the times, and, step by step, without forcing, has been steadily renewed since the first ‘live’ in 2002. We encounter the fine accordion playing of Vincent Peirani, the furious drum solos of the ever-faithful Aidje Tafial, the groove vibrations of bassists Kevin Reveyrand and the warm guitar of Frank Anastasio. A band of disciples who know how to tauten – and tauten still further! and relax! – those crazy Gypsy races towards energies more up-to-date than they might seem at first glance, funk trip-hop or free jazz.
When necessary, they also know how to shoot off the rails, the better to start up again... at an even hotter tempo! The whole is embellished by a thirteen-minute DVD directed by Olivier Slabiak, a montage of images of concerts, interviews, and travelling.
Compilation - BEST OYF
The compilation features fifteen tracks that run through their five studio albums: A Band of Gypsies (1992), Suite (1994), Izvoara (1997), Balamouk (2000), and Tchorba (2004). Renowned for each of their public appearances, Les Yeux Noirs are inseparably associated with gypsy gallops and trances: they guarantee an exhilarating, generous show. Invariably acrobatic and energetic, these virtuoso numbers always lead the way to gentler, more nostalgic tunes . . . Because you have to get your breath back – even when you deliberately ignore the wind instruments so dear to the Klezmer style.
But also because ‘what’s past is over’, Vos Iz Gevein as they say in the song that is duly reprised here. In fact, the unique style of Les Yeux Noirs, as it has developed, has found its way to a rock sound, choosing to sublimate its ready-made sauces from the family circle, to go beyond squeaky-clean acoustic intentions. It has even developed a pronounced taste for that sound since Balamouk,the album that marked the musicians’ maturity in a genuine rebirth that opened the way to more contemporary arrangements, still more personal strokes of harmonic and melodic daring. Living and breathing with its times, the group constantly explores new territory, reinvents itself, sharpens its appetite for disconcerting change, challenging a scrupulous loyalty to the repertoire it has handled since its early days.
Yiddish and contemporary
Hence the compilation does not neglect Les Deux guitares, so dear to Aznavour, nor the inevitable Danse des flèches, Hora de Mina, or Djelem, the international Gypsy anthem. But it also bursts forth, like the rebirth of a flower, in the famous Yiddishe Mame, the lament that makes every Jewish Momma cry, rediscovered with a trip-hop touch on their album Balamouk. And Tchaye too has a new feel to it, this time via a wild-paced yet also really singing remix, little-known until now and previously unreleased.
A spark and a double childhood
For in both the sound and the concentrated glance of Les Yeux Noirs, there is always a detail that remains to be figured out, a spark that dazzles and immediately escapes you, probably because it contains as much dream as it does light, and bears as many mysteries as it does memories. This spell is undoubtedly highly musical, and also somewhat cosmic. No more than a fraction of a second is needed for the spark to pass from Olivier’s glance to Eric’s. At the risk of getting lost, anyone who speaks to the pair can only guess at the reflections of a double childhood, poetic and much-travelled, in the riot of colours created by the magic of two violins, intertwined, virtuosic, fervent. It was only to be expected: the multiple memories of the two musician brothers are inextricable, as if belonging to the same amalgam, the same enchantment. Olivier has assembled some selected highlights from them in the film offered as a bonus with the ‘Opre Scena’: archive footage from Peter Gabriel’s festival WOMAD, at which they are faithful guests, excerpts from interviews and concerts taken from Romanian, American, and Argentine television. Here you can see Les Yeux Noirs caught recently in a positively delirious performance at a large-scale festival in Buenos Aires, playing to 15,000 spectators so enraptured by their antics that a crush is only narrowly avoided, and the crowd control is under heavy pressure. When you get down to it, the group has done it all: busking, weddings, cabarets, celebratory concerts, extravagant festivals like Buenos Aires, not forgetting the most prestigious permanent theatres.
‘In any case,’ Olivier promises, ‘we always try to go as far as possible in terms of coming out of ourselves, picking up all the good feelings without ever forgetting that what we’re making is above all music of trance and imperfection.’
‘When you’re in a state of trance,’ adds Eric, ‘it can only be in the audience’s company. We’re not talking here about a physical performance, but a journey towards a sound, a soul, a fusion which is conveyed in beautiful smiles, laughter, and sometimes even tears from the audience. Those are always moments of very intense emotion, far beyond the power of words.’
Memories and enchantments
From the Avignon Festival, the springboard that got them started, by way of tours to the cultural centres of East Africa and all the Bataclans, Cigales and Olympias of the world, in Tel Aviv, Sydney and New York, the memories still come thick and fast . . . It’s probably listening to their music that we get back to basics: from those impalpable jumbled reminiscences that befuddle the memories of real life, to more deeply buried recollections of families soaked in Gypsy and Manouche music for centuries.
On the live CD there is a precious moment from their show where we discover the slender, confident voice of their grandmother Esther singing Vos is Gevin in Yiddish.
For Eric and Olivier, this kind of feeling is inseparable from the heady aromas of the family bakery, located in the heart of the Marais district of Paris. An unexpected sanctuary where the Slabiaks have often got together to make music, and where their uncles Charlie and Leo, both professional violinists, used to bring their friends, beginning with Joseph Reinhardt and his pals from the Hot Club de France.
Their younger brother Adrien, father of Eric and Olivier, a pianist and saxophonist who had stayed amateur because of a broken thumb, transferred his ardour to his children: Nathalie, the eldest, a pianist; Lara, the youngest, a cellist; and of course the violinist brothers Eric and Olivier. They were the pride of the family, and the little virtuosos of the stage school they attended, long before they ever invented Les Yeux Noirs. Which explains their triple culture, which they fully assume and proclaim today: classical, thanks to their parallel courses of study leading to premiers prix at the Brussels Conservatoire; rock, through all the music they listen to (they love Tom Waits and Portishead, Björk and David Bowie); and of course Yiddish, through their immediate family and their forebears who arrived in Paris from Poland in the 1920s. Coming from such a background, can they tell us how old they were when they first heard Yankele, the Arrow Dance or Yiddishe Mame? They’re not sure they can. But Eric and Olivier Slabiak have learnt to examine their childhood, filled with violins and Yiddish songs, with bittersweet flavours and outbursts of vitality, and to enjoy it. To enjoy it so much that they have made it one of their most beautiful reasons for living and for continuing to travel through the mad rush of time – in the name of Les Yeux Noirs.
Alexis Campion
translation : Charles Johnston
11/04/09