World Musette

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:36:09 -0600

The story of the Primitifs du Futur begins in 1986, when Robert Crumb was invited to take part in the Angoulême Comic-Book Festival. He stayed on after the event and made Paris his home for a few months, together with his wife and daughter.It's not widely-known that the man who was Pope of the underground comic in the Seventies is also a great admirer of Twenties' and Thirties' recordings – principally blues and country, but also French music like the musette variety popular in Paris. A talented mandolin-player who also plucks the banjo and the ukulele, Crumb was for a long time the leader of a now-legendary group calling itself The Cheap Suit Serenaders. He was introduced to Dominique Cravic, who took him forthwith to visit another mandolin-freak by the name of Jean-Claude Asselin, and the result was a kind of mpromptu “musette jam”. Before Crumb returned to The United States, the whole crew decided that these moments of great utopia should be preserved for posterity. A gleeful Cocktail d’amour was recorded – a famous 10" vinyl now a real collectors' item – containing six tracks that mingled blues and musette with a tender fervour. The group quickly found a name for itself: Les Primitifs du Futur. The droll, provocative paradox in the name was seen by Cravic and Roussin as a deliberate statement of a basically simple conviction: that it was possible to invent a new youth for the past, to make new from old.

New Music From Les Primitifs Du Futur on Calabash Music

World Musette