How I Made

WORDS: JIM BUTLER. PHOTOS: BAZIL LAMY

In 1998, Laurent Garnier took a phone call that not only changed the course of his career, it planted a creative seed that eventually gave birth to one of his most memorable, certainly one of his most distinctive and unquestionably one of his best-loved tracks, ‘The Man With the Red Face’.

“Christian [Paulet, his manager] rang me and told me that I’d been asked to play live at Montreux Jazz Festival. I thought: ‘Fuck! What do I do? Playing live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the place where Miles Davis played. Who the fuck am I to go and play there after monsters like that?’ It was strange. But then again we were in a time when techno was getting out of the clubs. It was getting out on the streets and in festivals like Montreux, and other pop rock festivals or whatever were starting to have a techno room. Finally the link was established. There was a good sense for us to go and play there.” In the 90s, the relationship between jazz and techno wasn’t as defined – or respected – as it is today. However, the founder of Montreux, Claude Nobs, was an open-minded music fan eager to push the boundaries.

“Back then it was very difficult to find someone in the jazz world who was open to electronic music. It’s better now – 30 years after. There were only guys like Bugge Wesseltoft who were open to us. Thankfully, the guy who ran Montreux Jazz [Nobs] was a very passionate man. He had hip hop. He had bands like Deep Purple playing, psychedelic bands, punk bands… he was very open. He wanted to move forwards. Always. So it was daring to ask us. As a matter of respect, I wanted to make a track that would have a more jazzy connotation and improvisation.”

The timing was serendipitous because Garnier was beginning to fall under the alluring and innovative spell of jazz.

“We were signing people to [his label] F Communications like [Frederic] Galliano and I was starting to explore jazz music. I didn’t when I was younger. Every time in my career I liked moving on to different things. When something becomes really fashionable I tend to go against it. I usually search somewhere else – I still do now I guess. And, yeah, jazz was talking to me and I kind of understood back then the root of jazz within techno music. I got it. Improvisation. Instrumental music. Pushing the machines. Searching. I understood the connection.”

When Garnier was approached about playing Montreux he was touring in Ireland with his band.

“One day we were rehearsing in the afternoon, because I had a drummer and a violinist. We used to have long rehearsals. I was usually pretty bored because my machine was on/off. Is it working ok? But we’d spend an hour on the drummer and half-an-hour with the violins, so I was just playing about with my headphones on and I started to get some stuff together. I had the Reese bass line; I did a bit of the drums and I just did that during rehearsals.

“The inspiration came from a track by The Deep, called ‘Dom Dom Jump’. It was reminiscent of Masters at Work with a trumpet player, and I thought: ‘Wow, this is quite nice to bring the wind element to house music.’ It worked really well. So I have to give him credit for putting a tick in my head. I got back home and I tried to search for a saxophonist.

“My drummer Daniel Bechet was the son of Sidney Bechet, a huge jazz man in France. Daniel had a lot of connections in the jazz world and he told me that he knew this guy called Finn, a saxophonist. So I met Finn. I told him I was working on a track for Montreux and I’d like to put a saxophone on it.

“I had a loop, this gimmick with the drums, which Finn helped me to put together, and then he improvised with his saxophone. We went to Montreux and right in the middle of the show we did this track which was completely improvised. It worked really well. We felt straight away that we had something. Something strong. Something that was funky.

“Unfortunately, Finn was a bit of a showman – to say the least (laughing). He was onstage and then the next minute he’d be jumping around and then he jumped off the stage, playing in front of the girls. I’m onstage thinking: ‘What the fuck are you doing, man? Get back on the stage.’ At the end of the live show I said to him: ‘No offence, but I don’t think we’ll carry on… You’re used to hanging off buildings and playing your saxophone. You’re used to doing big shows and this is not what we do.’ So it was great to do Montreux. We had a good time, but no we didn’t carry on.”

Another prestigious 1998 gig – this time at Paris’ world-famous music hall, Olympia – led to Garnier working with another temporary saxophonist.

“Again we do this Montreux track – it still has no name – and it works well. People seem to like it. I tell the saxophonist, who could only do this Olympia gig, that I need a guy. I liked the idea of having a saxophonist in the show and want to go further with it. He tells me about a guy he knows called Philippe Nadaud who he says is great and available. So I meet the famous Philippe Nadaud. And straight away it works. We go and play live and we

play the Montreux track a few times. One day we decided we needed to go and record it. The recording was a bit of a different kettle of fish.”

Garnier, his sound engineer, Laurent Collat, and Nadaud met at Garnier’s Paris studio. The track’s brooding bass line was already there - as was its ominous, almost malevolent undercurrent. What was missing, obviously, was the saxophone part.

“I said to Philippe: ‘I know in jazz, you guys have ways of playing music. So if you play bebop you play bebop. If you play free, you play free and you don’t mix the two together.’ But I told him he could do whatever the fuck he liked. ‘You can do one phrase bebop and you can do another phrase super freestyle.

Just go with the flow.’ So we put a pair of headphones on Philippe and I said to him I’m just gonna send you the loop and I’m gonna record you.

“When he started to play I turned to Laurent [Collat] and said: ‘Check this out.’ I could talk to Philippe while he was playing. So I said: ‘This is shit.’ And then I went: ‘It’s getting even worse.’ We made him play for 20 minutes, cursing him. We were saying: ‘This is bad. We need more. This is crap. Blah, blah, blah.’ After 20 or 25 minutes, I stop. And Phillipe stops. He’s bright red, looking at me, going: ‘What the fuck?’ I said: ‘It’s ok. We’ve got everything we need. Now you can go home.’ He just said: ‘You motherfucker.’ He was bright red. And I said to him: ‘I’ve got the title of the song too: ‘The Man With the Red Face’.’

“I did the edit two or three days after. I remember it was a Thursday or Friday and I was supposed to play in Montpellier that night. There’s two instruments on the track – there’s the saxophone and then there’s an electronic sax called a Ewi. Philippe played both. I do this edit with the phrases going into each other and answering each other, you know, fucking around with Philippe’s way of playing. And I finish a mix which I think is nice. I put it on tape. And then I go to Montpellier. It was a chaotic night, but I wanted to try this track out. But playing a tape in a DJ set was not very easy – it’s not like now with a USB stick. I find a place in my mix where I just stop the track, put on an a capella and then, bang, I play ‘The Man With the

Red Face’ and after five minutes the whole room is going absolutely fucking ballistic. I look at everybody thinking: ‘What is going on?’ I played the track again at the end as a last track. Same reaction.

Thinking he has something strong; Garnier sends his edit to Nadaud to get his thoughts.

“He said: ‘Laurent, what the fuck did you do? You can’t play like that as a saxophonist. If I had to replay it you can’t play like that.’ But I just wanted to know if he liked it? Whether he thought it was good or not? He told me he liked it. So there it was. I told him that I wasn’t asking him to ever replay it like that. Live is different. But I told him that if he was happy with it. And he wasn’t ashamed by what I did with it – with the cutting and editing – then I thought it was great.

“The track is extremely simple. There’s a Juno 106 Reese bass, percussion – nothing special in there – and then the funky, Herbie Hancock-ish gimmick is a Yamaha DX100, which was a very small keyboard that I bought because a lot of the Detroit guys used it at the beginning and I really like the texture. It’s kind of a toy keyboard, but it’s one of the root keyboards of Detroit music. The rest is not much more – apart from the saxophone.

“When I recorded it in my studio with Philippe – how many months after [first messing about in the rehearsals in Ireland] – the track never evolved. 90% of that track was made on that stage in Ireland. The surprising thing about it is that at the end of day the track was made in 10 minutes. Not 10 minutes… 20 minutes. Really. I used some of the percussion from my other tracks because I didn’t have a drum machine or anything. I pinched the hi hat from that; I pinched that from that, put it all together, did this bassline… I liked the groove. And that’s it.”

Throughout 1999, Garnier continued playing ‘The Man With the Red Face’ in his DJ sets – not least at his famed Thursday night residency at The Rex Club in Paris. The track was a cornerstone of his third album, ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’, released early in 2000 and named Album of the Issue in Jockey Slut. Released as a single in April, the track reached the lofty heights of 65 in the British charts, although when released as a two-part 12-inch later that year, alongside another album track, ‘Greed’, it actually gave Garnier his first – and, to date, only – Top 40 British hit, landing at number 36.

“Besides what the track is about, ‘The Man With the Red Face’ is a very pivotal point in my career, where I kind of switched and wanted to explore more with musicians and

go a bit further. That track is the key moment where we moved to a more freestyle jazz-way of improvising. I could somehow find a way to not be a proper musician, as I would have loved to be, but be more like a director, a conductor.

“I did that for a few years and then moved on and I haven’t really made any jazzy tracks for some time. It doesn’t mean I won’t again. I’m just experimenting. I try things on and if we do something strong I’ll never repeat it – I mean a lot of people would probably like me to make another ‘The Man With the Red Face’ but I can’t. There’s no point. I don’t see the point. The same reason that I don’t want to do another ‘Crispy Bacon’. I want to do something else. I want to surprise myself.” One thing that did surprise Garnier recently was the urge to play it in one of his DJ sets.

“I don’t play it very often. But I played it last week. I finished my set… I was on the mountains, playing outside, not under my normal name, I was playing a strictly house set: house and African music, no techno, and one man kept asking if I was going to play ‘The Man With the Red Face’? This happens all the time and normally I don’t like playing my stuff too much, but this time I thought: ‘Yeah, it makes sense. We’re outside. We’re happy, let’s do it.’

“As I played it I was thinking about how good it sounds after all these years. There are some tracks of mine that I hear and I think I should re-record it. I don’t like the mix, or I don’t like this or I don’t like that. On this track, even though I can’t confess it’s my favourite track of mine – I like it – but there are tracks of mine that I like more which have done nothing, but that’s ok, it doesn’t matter. But when I played it last week I thought: ‘Wow, I’m not embarrassed by it because I think the track sounds good even after all these years.’ The mix is a bit weird but it works. It’s cool.

“It got old in a nice way. It didn’t get dusty. It’s like nice wine. It stayed with its flavour and everything is still there. It didn’t get dusty. Some old tracks can get dusty, so I’m happy with that.”