Jacques Berrocal - Biography
Jacques Berrocal is an amazing musical polyglot who has been vivifying the French experimental scene since the 1970s. He’s an indefatigable force who doesn’t seem to recognize any sort of musical boundary; he sings, composes, and plays trumpet; his repertoire careens wildly from post-jazz to improv to quasi-punk warbling, spoken word, peculiar Continental industrial, no wave and plain ol’ rock ‘n’ roll. He was instrumental in the founding of the acclaimed d'Avantage label, which, despite being criminally underappreciated, was one of the preeminent avant-garde presses of the late 1970s. With Steven Stapleton, Berrocal played a similarly essential role in the initial output of Nurse with Wound, and from there he formed the group Catalogue, a thoroughly tumultuous band that threw a spanner in the works in both the rock and experimental realms, with a thoroughly unique, anarchic sound that baffled any and all listeners. He’s infatuated with Ornette Coleman, medieval music, and everything in between. Sure, the French take hits for not being able to produce a decent rock band to save their olive-oil-slathered souls, but within that is the key to Berrocal’s enduring success — he’s an aural apostate who can’t even imagine bowing to convention.
Around the same time in the early 1960s, Berrocal was introduced to both rock ‘n’ roll and the daring sonorities of John Coltrane. It requires a considerable degree of objectivity to recall that “My Favorite Things” and “Mystery Train” were so far out as to invite ridicule, but Berrocal wasn’t laughing, he was listening, and soon he was singing, in a band. From there he quickly picked up the coronet, then the trumpet. By the end of the 60s, he was waist-deep in the riotous scene in Paris, in which music, Dada, and student protest all converged, and motorcycles were as common on stage as guitars. Berrocal absorbed it all, as his first album demonstrates. Musiq Musik (1973 Futura Records) is a genre-bending exercise and sound manipulation. Aware that plate reverb units were the exclusive domain of expensive recording studios, Berrocal, along with Dominique Coster and Roger Ferlet, went for the natural effect. He recorded the album in a medieval vault — the crypt of Saint Savinien — in Sens, and the results were striking. Existing in a liminal space beyond improv, modernism, or contemporary composition, Musiq Musik is an overlooked classic.
Berrocal’s next album may be his personal best. Parallèles (1977 d'Avantage) is a wild, kaleidoscopic, disorienting romp through deranged sonic vistas. Berrocal displays a wonderful knack for delivering bewildering juxtapositions, see-sawing from atonal texture to pseudo-ethnic solos and back again, then just as abruptly lurching into song. “Post-Card” features text found on a postcard on the street, and was recorded inside a hog barn; there are solo acoustic passages and interludes for trumpet and coronet; elsewhere, there’s “Bric-à-brac (To Russolo),” a 25-minute epic for a large ensemble, dedicated to the Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo. However, the highlight is the notorious “Rock ‘n’ Roll Station,” a prototypical piece of guff for bass, trumpet and bicycle (!). The vocals are by famed 60s artist Vince Taylor, David Bowie’s original inspiration for Ziggy Stardust.
After Parallèles, Berrocal released Catalogue (1979 d'Avantage), a perplexing stew of sloppy rock, sardonic Dixieland, field reciordings and free-form freak out, performed on everything from trumpet and bass to toy instruments, saw blades, guns, and gingerbread. Just to further confound matters, that same year Berrocal formed a group called Catalogue, with the initial lineup of Michel Potage on bass, Jean-Pierre Arnoux on drums, Patrick Prado on sax and the outstanding Jean-François Pauvros on guitar. Catalogue never found a large audience; they were too aggressively inventive for the punk scene, and too aggressively aggressive for the avant-garde scene. However, they recorded a number of superb albums, including Antwerpen Live 11 Aug. 1979 1.30 H Belgie (1979 Pot Record), Pénétration (1982 Hat Hut), and Insomnie (1987 Blue Silver).
Berrocal also ratcheted up his credentials by supplying a dose of creative bluster and aesthetic brio to the first two Nurse with Wound LPs, both classics of the nascent Industrial genre (and both far more inventive and open minded than their subsequent hoards of imitators). Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979 United Dairies) and To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl (1980 United Dairies) are sonic car wrecks, bizarre and inspired collisions of noise, pop, ambient, easy listening, musique concrete, and they’re pivot points, where Berrocal’s influence slowly starts to leak and ooze into greater public consciousness.
Berrocal remained active throughout the 80s, collaborating with Stapleton and numerous other artists. In the 1990s he formed a trio with avant-blues titan Jonathan Kane and Catalogue’s Jean-François Pauvros. This ensemble appears several times on Fatal Encounters (1993 Les Disques Du Soleil Et De L'Acier) as well as the compilation, They Came, They Played, They Blocked The Driveway (1993 WFMU). And in case anyone doubts Berrocal’s insatiable musical appetites and unquenchable conceptual thirsts, he’s more recently worked with esteemed accordion chanteuse Yvette Horner. Again, the man recognizes no boundaries.
