Alain Chamfort is a musician, singer and composer. He has accompanied us for more than 50 years. First, alongside Jacques Dutronc, then with Dick Rivers, Claude François, Véronique Sanson, he finally went solo with the title: Manurevawritten by Serge Gainsbourg in 1979. He has just released a new album: Symphonic Dandy, a collector’s vinyl release is scheduled for March 18. He will also be in concert on March 11 at the Grand Rex in Paris, June 2 in Rennes, June 3 at the Anne de Bretagne Theater in Vannes.
franceinfo: In this new album, Symphonic Dandy, 17 of your essential songs are revisited and rearranged, in symphony by Nobuyuki Nakajima, with 51 musicians from the National Orchestra of Montpellier-Occitanie. How did you experience this intensive, strong and collective work too?
It was wonderful. Me, I never hoped to be able to live such a thing one day. When you’re a musician, it’s a hidden dream, like that, but you really have to have a lucky star or benefit from a proposal like that of Valérie Chevalier, who is the director of the Opéra de Montpellier, and also of the orchestra which had the idea of imagining that my repertoire or at least part of it could lend itself to this type of treatment, symphonic arrangements. And she was right.
How did you experience letting someone else take over? Usually, you have everything under control, and there you really focused your role on interpretation. Did it do you any good?
Totally. That is to say that I am incapable of writing orchestrations for a symphony orchestra. I can, as I have often done, write in the studio with musicians and give them directions because I am a musician myself. But writing for desks of wood, strings and all that, I don’t know how to do. So you really had to work with a specialist.
I had the chance to work with Nobuyuki Nakajima, who had also previously written arrangements for Jane Birkin. As we are in a somewhat similar register with Jane in vocal terms, we don’t have powerful voices, slightly fragile voices, so the orchestration must both be able to express itself as well as possible and at the same time respect this tessitura and this vocal fragility. As he had succeeded in doing it with Jane Birkin, I said to myself: there is no reason why he should not do it with me and so, we worked like that and we discovered the reality when the orchestra began to play.
Did it also change your view of your titles that you thought you knew by heart?
Orchestrations are like film music, that is, there is something that adds an emotional value.
Alain Chamfortat franceinfo
Of course, when I sang, I was carried by these orchestrations and I had other manners to place my voice and to try to harmonize myself with what I heard. And those were also times when I was a bit emotional myself, realizing all that. In spite of everything, we had to keep control. There is something quite unique, indeed, and which I was not really quite ready for yet.
There is a letting go in this record. I’m thinking especially of the song The LPs. You lay yourself bare in the interpretation.
We are still helped enough to be able to do it and I must say that it is a different pleasure to be able to try to be completely in what we are doing, to be fair in the interpretation, in what we are discussing. To try to be like an actor in a way, to try to be more fair with what we are telling.
Except that the main role is still yours. When you look at the 17 songs, they represent part of the movie of your life.
Yes, it is strange. We had chosen all the songs, but I hadn’t gone through the process of placing them one after the other. And then, at one point, there was an obviousness that settled like that, there was a real narrative with this boy who, first, has just introduced himself, then afterwards, to whom a love story happens and breakup. And then there is the wandering, the reconstruction.
You said it, this starting point was a proposal to actually do a concert with different arrangements, with a symphony orchestra with you. On March 11, you will be at the Grand Rex, a room that is really a setting for a symphony orchestra. Are you dreading going on stage?
It is true that there is apprehension because this number of musicians is quite impressive. You can’t go wrong, you have no room for error because especially when you’re a small team with the musicians I’m used to working with and often there are two of us , the pianist Thierry Eliez and me, there is really a whole space to be able to improvise. If there is a small error, people easily forgive us, we start again, we tell a story, a stupidity and it starts again. There, we don’t have the right because they are there, behind, and they are advancing, they are continuing, they are not waiting for you. Yes, we have to be very concentrated and then, it’s our job. At the same time, we are there for that, we are not going to complain.