Gare Du Nord: Downtempo Meets Cool Jazz
Gare du Nord music is so good, I forgave them for being Eurotrash fashion victims
A band's public image is never the sum total of their music. If image was everything, I would have taken a pass listening to the music of Gare du Nord, a band whose members dress in black and remind me of the Eurotrash posuers who travel in entourages to discothèques in Ibiza and Cannes and guzzle down Dom Pérignon right from the bottle. My own dislike of the Eurotrash style tells you more about my own class bias and very little about the music of Gare du Nord. Public image is never the sum total of any band's attibutes and I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of Gare du Nord's musical sophistication. You miss out lot of good music when you let your own carefully conditioned biases about style and genre overule your inquisitive impulse to explore music and art with an open mind.
A Short History of Gare du Nord
Gare du Nord named themselves after the Gare du Nord train station in the heart of Paris. The Gare du Nord station is busiest Metro station in Paris (180 million riders a year!). The jazz cafes and cellars in the Montmarte distict served by Gare Du Nord became the musical home of American expatriate jazz musicians like Dexter Gordon and Chet Baker after American interest in waned in the early 60s.
The imposing neo-classical facade of the Gare du Nord entrance has served as a backdrop for many films including the critically acclaimed film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (aka Amelie) which made actress Audrey Tautou an international film star. A photobooth in the Gare du Nord is used as a plot device in Amelie
Cool jazz was a big influence on Gare du Nord's Dutch/Belegian founders who are Doc (Ferdy Lancee) and Inca (Barend Fransen). Shortly thereafter Doc and Inca made Gare du Nord a trio by enlisting the sensuous Italian singer Dorona Alberti who sings in a sultry voice this is reminiscent of the jazz cabaret chanteuse performance style.
Gare du Nord developed an enthusiastic cult following among the jazz savvy Parisian club circuit. In 2002, Gare du Nord's music created a buzz on the outernational scene with the release of their album
Kind of Cool in 2002. The abum title,
Kind of Cool was Gare du Nord's statement on the influence of Miles Davis.
Kind of Cool was clever combination of the titles of Miles' first and last cool jazz albums;
Birth of the Cool (1949) and
Kind of Blue (1959). The music of other Parisian deejays like Dimitri from Paris and DJ Cam is inundated with with samples from the cool jazz era.
Gare du Nord samples and remixes many standards from the cool era of jazz, but the band also composes original music that is more within the realm of trip hop music. The cool jazz influence is prevasive in all of Gare du Norde's music.
Miles Davis usually had a scowl on his face and frequently played with his back to the audience. His highly impressionistic and minimalist approach was widely imitated and his influence over the first generation of French acid jazz, ambient and trip hop artists is ubiquitous.
A Short History of Cool Jazz
The hard bop of the Charlie "Bird" Parker evolved into cool jazz at the end of World War II as the next generation of players began to assert themselves. Many musicians from the bee-bop school followed the cool jazz trend which spanned roughly ten years between 1949 & 1959. Cool jazz emerged as the dominant musical trend of the 50s and was exemplified by musical titans like Stan Getz, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Mann, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. Especially Miles who was at the leading edge of every new development of jazz music for 50 years. This link to
Hard Bop & Cool Jazz will provide you with excellent thumbnail profiles of the central musicians involved in the cool jazz movement.
A handful of cool jazz artists most notably Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Charlie Byrd and Herbie Mann broke ranks with cool jazz and began musical experiments that fused the Brazilian samba and bossa nova with the cool jazz approach. Getz and Byrd were lionized for their groundbreaking collaborations with Brazilian artists like Joao and Astrud Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Another Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes formed Brazil '66 and enjoyed unprecedented mainstream success with his trademark brand of Brazilian jazz/American pop fusion.
Gare du Nord's signature song,
Kind of Cool samples long passages of Miles Davis' trumpet as a musical foundation.
Kind of Cool boldly accentuates Miles' dark and mysterious quality by drenching the samples of trumpet playing with high doses of reverb echoes. The phat bass and drum mix, the improvised lead vocal, the liquid splash of a synthesizer, and the overdubbed "cool down" chorus are nice counterpoints to Miles Davis' otherworldly but highly precise minimalist approach to playing.
Kind of Cool is a remarkable song because it reinvents Miles Davis in a bold new context without undermining the integrity of the original artist's vision. Miles' last studio album,
Aura (1989) was an impressionistic journey into minimalism and bore a close resembalance to a lot of the current acid jazz, trip hop and ambient music.