Christophe Chassol & Boris Memmi

Villa Albertine’s residency will give us the opportunity to study stand-up as a form of prosodic art and thus continue our research regarding the musicality of speech. The aim is to meet and exchange with comedians, to interview them, to study and record their performances so that we can then identify each individual note of the melodies resulting from each individual syllable of their flow. We would then harmonize all the notes and use them to create a score which would then be sung by a choir (Radio France).

I have called these works “Ultrascores”: they are audiovisual pieces, the music of which has been created using the sounds existing in the images which have been shot. My work as a composer of music for films has hugely contributed to these creations which have used birdsong, prose, field recordings, tangible sounds, different languages and lands. My filming technique combines documentary, staging and even animation.

The research that we will carry out at Villa Albertine is based our my deep-rooted love of stand-up, rap and musicals as well as our burning desire to see and hear the flows of African American comedians sung with searing precision by a choir. A a view to creating something new.

Stand-up is deeply rooted in the United States. It is an art form which has changed very little since it first started in the beginning of the 19th century. The fact that it is now able to compete on streaming platforms with super productions, animations and big-budget television series despite only needing a comedian, a microphone and a stage, is testament to how powerful and relevant it has become whether as regards its poetry, its musicality, its rhetoric, its social and political standing or its cathartic nature.

We would like to study African American prose as it relates to rap, as well as Ebonics (ebony & phonics), the African-American slang English or “Black English”Ebonics (ebony & phonics), the African-American slang English or “Black English”. It is in Chicago, more particularly the South-Side, where we can find the relevant people to speak with, the places to visit, the actors, musicians, culture and history which we require so as to study the beauty of the way this language swings, the manner in which it uses neologisms and the social issues it raises when it is promoted or cancelled.
In addition, for me personally, Chicago is a kind of musical Holy Grail I have rarely found elsewhere. In my opinion, Minnie Ripperton’s album “Come to my garden” is the height of avant-garde orchestral soul produced, composed and arranged by one of my idols, Charles Stepney: born in the South Side and head of the Chess Records music label and cult group, Rotary Connection. Stepney’s popular and knowledgeable arrangements, like stand-up, could only have been written in Chicago with the “best orchestra in the world”, the Chicago Symphony orchestra. I would like to do a deeper dive to understand these sounds by meeting with the heirs of this cross-over (popular + knowledgeable) and introducing them to my method.