Alan Stivell

1971. The stage of the Olympia in Paris hosts an exceptional cast, proof that the wind of electric folk, which for some years had already been shaping the fortunes of rock and traditional music across the Channel, was blowing strong on French soil too. Gabriel Yacoub, mastermind of Malicorne, who with the live album "En Public" would mark the peak of Fairport Convention-style folk-rock; Dan Ar Braz, who would briefly serve as Fairport's own guitarist; Alan Cochevelou, better known as Alan Stivell, le barde, the musician who the year before had brought Breton music to the attention of half of Europe with "La renaissance de l'harpe celtique".

1. Escape into tradition

Almost forty years have passed since then, years in which new age has cast a veneer of cut-rate spirituality over anything remotely Celtic-sounding, while indie aesthetics have banned every ornament and every whiff of the fairytale. The result: what was once revolutionary, vital music today risks symbolizing the very essence of the outdated, the spirit of an era almost tiresome in its illusion of being able to improve things rather than simply destroying them or losing interest in them.

And yet, the maturation of progressive and electric folk already concealed a kind of surrender. As it entered adulthood, rock stopped being a weapon of social change: with its concept albums, its imaginary worlds, its return to traditional pasts, it implicitly accepted the failure of the hippie project, of 1968, of youth as an engine of change.

The escape into myth, fairy tale and magic was a return to innocence after the "game of Prometheus" of the late Sixties. And innocence is precisely one of the concepts that "celtic folk" evokes most powerfully: by rehabilitating circular narrative structures, often devoid of choruses, it conjures the rural childhood of industrial man, that endless succession of afternoons and seasons that seemed as though it would never end.

The natural counterpart to this dream is melancholy, born from having to acknowledge its impossibility. It is around this duality that the atmosphere of "À l'Olympia" revolves.

2. Blown in the wind of Keltia

Alan Stivell sings in English, in French, in Gaelic. He plays the flute, the bagpipes. And the harp: crystalline, dazzling, it is this instrument more than any other that lifts these twelve compositions out of time.

The rest is done by the words, and by the rejection of the verse/chorus opposition and its musical counterpart: the major/minor dichotomy. Like much traditional European music, that of the Celtic world is built on the ancient modes, one for each note of the scale.

"An Dro" alternates Aeolian D (the usual "minor") and Dorian G, creating for today's ear a sense of disorientation and suspension that makes it hard to pin down the harmonic center. From harmonic suspension to temporal "abduction" is a short step.

A similar effect is created by the pentatonic scale of “The Trees They Grow High”, entered on the second note of the major scale rather than the first, or the fifth as in blues. The song, already made famous by the Pentangle (with “Sweet Child”), is known in Italy through a translation by Branduardi

The trees they grow high, the leaves

He’s young, but he’s daily growing

Father, dear father, you’ve done me great wrong

He’s young, but he’s daily growing

Daughter, dear daughter, I’ve done you no wrong

He’s young, but he’s daily growing

At the age of sixteen, he was a married man

Cruel death put an end to his growing.

The trees they grow high, the leaves 

He’s young, but he’s daily growing

The trees are tall, the leaves grow green

How long since you last saw your love,

so long, and today he has come back all alone:

he's young but he will grow.

Father, o father, you've done me a grave wrong

you gave me in marriage to one who is

little more than a child,

she is fifteen and I am already almost twenty:

he's young but he will grow.

Daughter, oh daughter, I have never wronged you,

I have given you in marriage to a Lord's son,

your child will be rich and respected:

he's young but he will grow.

Father, oh father, tomorrow I will be alone,

they will send him away for another year still,

and upon his return he will have a child that is a stranger to him:

he's young but he will grow.

Yesterday morning, sitting on your balcony,

you watched the boys playing in the street,

your true love was the most handsome of them all:

he's young but he will grow.

A year later he had taken a wife,

time passes and he is now the father of a child,

time runs on and your flower lies upon his grave:

he is young but he will grow

The themes that describe the human condition – the passing of the seasons, the loss of youth, differences of class, age, generation – stand in contrast to the impassiveness of nature: while men die, the cycle of leaves and of trees, tall and superior, repeats and is reborn ever the same. This is a recurring topos in pre-industrial music, which manifests itself first and foremost on a structural level through the repetition of a rigid pattern, especially in the closing line of each verse.

The same pattern recurs on the musical level, and it's even more evident in the instrumental, dance-oriented pieces. Each track is built on the repetition of a couple of rhythmic-melodic modules, with slight, progressive variations dictated by the introduction of an ever-growing number of instruments. The embellishments layered onto the base figures belong to a well-established vocabulary: just as on the lyrical plane, on the musical one too Celtic-area music is strongly grammatical, translating a social system built on unbending relationships.

It's easy to distinguish – not only by their titles – the gavottes and branles of Breton origin ("An Dro", "An Alarch's", "Pop Plinn", "Kost Ar Ch'hoad", "Tri Martolod", "Suite sudarmoricaine") from the Anglo-Saxon hornpipes and ballads ("The King Of Fairies", "The Foggy Dew", "The Trees They Grow High").

The French pieces have a more "choral" dimension, more cadenced and built on a greater variety of dry, asymmetrical phrases. Within this structure they preserve the echo of the balli a inchino (bowing dances) they used to accompany, which is why they sound particularly "medieval".

3. Faces of granite and faces of angels

So far the tracks have done all the work themselves: little has been said about the interpretation by Alan Stivell and co. Theirs was first and foremost an act of reconstruction – one might even say counterfeiting. The "Celtic harp" did not exist in Brittany before Stivell, nor had it ever existed. Here are the arrangement elements of the opening "The Wind Of Keltia": a churchy hammond drone, an errant tin whistle, cascading arpeggios, a delicate, suspended voice, guitar drawing on the blues in the manner of David Gilmour. Everything converges, title included, to create the enchanted atmosphere of a recreation – or rather a reinvention! – of a myth and an era (curiously, the incipit of "Liege & Lief" did the same thing with a much more energetic thrust).

Two modes of intervention on the songs can be identified: one is the one already examined, aiming for suggestion and working especially on the slower, sung pieces; the other instead plays on revitalization, making full use of the rock arsenal set up on stage. "Pop Plinn", "Tha Mi Sgith" and "Kost Ar C'hoad" incorporate into the typical jam-like drive of Celtic dance music the stylistic traits of nascent hard rock (distorted blues guitar, organ eruptions built on vibrato) and of ELP-style progressive rock (martial drumming alternating with jazz inflections, rich interplay and soloistic emphasis).

This makes the pace not only tight and gripping, but also strongly dynamic in its alternation between evocative moments and more muscular episodes.

The two approaches combine in two of Stivell's signature tracks: "Tri Martolod" and "Suite sudarmoricaine". The first (the title means "Three Sailors") is lively from its very ABAB structure, and the band's backing vocals turn it into the expression of a collective feeling that ends up drawing in the audience too. "Suite sudarmoricaine", not by chance chosen as the encore, relies on a particularly repetitive structure and what is perhaps the record's most spirited melody (complete with a "la la la" at the end of each verse), starting points for a rock crescendo in which the instruments join in one after another.

4. Good news for the Bretons/ and a curse upon France! ("An Alarc'h")

On the live album "À l'Olympia", nothing is left to chance. And yet, however much of a "fallback" the fervour animating this traditionalist revival might be, Alan Stivell's music sounds deeply felt. This is also because Stivell has, since the Sixties, been the foremost standard-bearer of the then-nascent Breton autonomist/independentist movement, and for him rediscovering his own local culture in no way means giving up the fight or its great ideals.

Precisely because of its strong political charge, the "À l'Olympia" performance shines with a light that cannot be reduced to a mere sum of its parts. It doesn't fall into the intellectualism that would seem an inevitable consequence of such an artificial act of restoration (language, musical styles, even instruments). It also avoids the kitsch machismo kitsch'n'roll that was very much at home in the more energetic "contaminated" rock of those years.

And above all, decades on, it retains intact its charge, its vitality, the limpid elegance of its age-old metaphors and of the dream they seek to evoke.

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27/04/2008