Arnaud Marzorati and Stéphanie d’Oustrac: Damn, you’re poor!

The Lunaisiens continue their historical-political journey in French song. After the Napoleonic splendor, here are the destitute and without grades. Damn it’s winter is an invigorating record that comes at just the right time in today’s France.

Astonishing coincidence, in the fall of 2022, between the sung words of the last disc designed by Arnaud Marzorati for his clique of Lunaisians and the words spoken by a certain Minister of Energy Transition to describe the poverty of some of our contemporaries. Farewell the poor: welcome to the people with severe sobriety » ! Damn it’s winter is the realistic counterpoint to this disconnected Newspeak. No Newspeak, therefore, in this disc with the unequivocally titled (Damn it’s wintertherefore) slapped on the face in the face of a very earthly tramp, and who dares to relegate his star in solid gold (Stéphanie d’Oustrac) to the back of the disc in the narrow frame of a tiny vignette.

Damn it’s winter!first title, opener Damn it’s winterthe disk, as it opened The Soliloquies of the Poor by Gabriel Randon de Saint-Amand, known as Jehan-Rictus, poet-songwriter by trade after a childhood abused by a Foil de Garotte mother, whom he tackled in his only novel (yarn to do) Marquise de Saint-Scolopendre de Tripapan-Ribon-Ribette. Before giving in to the nationalist sirens of 14-18, then to the monarchist sirens of Action Française, before exercising his talents in Montmartre cabarets (Quat’z’arts, Chat noir), Jehan-Rictus (he was keen on union of his stage name) had sunk into extreme precariousness. As a child (not recognized by his parents) who had become a tramp in the Court of Miracles at the end of the 19th century, he had also frequented anarchist bohemians and literary circles (from Heredia, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Francis Carco, etc.). This dive into the bell had allowed him the success, in 1897, of these Soliloquies of the poor closest to the verb of the street.

A verb that we find in all the compositions of the disc invited in the wake of Jehan-Rictus: compositions which, as Arnaud Marzorati says, have the duty to capture, in a few introductory measures, the ear of the passer-by, whether it is discographic or not. Damn it’s winter begins with a bang (literally) with a Day of wrath hard-hitting anonymous and does not let go of its onboard listener for a festive social dance of the dead where the names that sing (Sparrow, Scotto, Cui…) are on an equal footing with the anonymous. Some instrumentals (Popy, Waldteufel…) of a disillusioned melancholy come to affix their balm on the gaping wounds opened by the rawness of a verb which does not frighten in front of a cat being called a cat.

From the violin to the barrel organ, the instrumentarium, necessarily economical, but glorified by an empathetic sound recording, is used with a science of delicate and spectacular effects. Interest is constantly revived between the galvanizing talent of an activist juggler of Arnaud Marzoratti, the subtle and pure interventions of Audomaria, a female vocal ensemble from Saint-Omer (from the terribly bouncy There’s cholera at this Peronal that Malicorne revealed in the 70s), and, finally, the rogue metamorphoses of the great Stéphanie d’Oustrac into a new Fréhel in songs whose, as in her current Lover of St. John, it is obviously only a greedy bite. Songs which would not have mismatched the classy repertoire of an interpreter who, too, has never been disconnected from popular song: Barbara.

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