Bouillabaisse Blues
“Marseille is not a city for tourists. Forget about doing any sightseeing here,” wrote Marseille-born author Jean-Claude Izzo. It is France’s largest commercial port and the biggest and busiest in the whole of the Mediterranean. Its no-mess charm has inspired at least 15 or so film directors, from Godard to Frankenheimer, who have picked the city as their lethal labyrinth for tragic romances and deadly car chases. Being the Miami of Europe, Marseille is home to an impressive range of ethnic communities, each producing their own exotic musical bouillabaisse. Somewhere in those hilly steps above the old port lives Mademoiselle Marseille, a mystical creature who haunts the forgotten places of the city: the Crystal Palace, the music halls of the 1930s, the Musée de la Mode… where the thirsty ghosts of Mediterranean marines come to drink and dance all night. She is a pseudo-virgin untouched by globalisation, or an experienced lover plastered in make-up. She is the muse and ancient cultural heritage of the Occitan musicians of the south of France.
Mademoiselle Marseille is also the name of the first album (and title track) by Moussu T e lei Jovents, a blues/folk collective that operates in Marseille. With their music, Moussu T e lei Jovents create a wonderful sonorous world of fragmented intimacies and exoticisms, cleansed of globalisation, in which the enigmatic ghost of a 1930s’ mademoiselle enjoys a secret reputation. From the old port she looks out over the sea, but manages to avoid a map-maker’s commanding overview. As a ghost she can no longer experience or reveal the deep hidden truths of the city’s genealogy. Yet, still mobile, she moves over and around its crackled surfaces, which are inhabited by Moussu T e lei Jovents and populated with their magnetic blues riffs and mysterious Occitan poetry.
 Photo: Ian Anderson |
Moussu T is Tatou, whose name is Occitan slang for Monsieur/Mr, and he has baptised his fellow band members Blu and Jamilson ‘lei Jovents’, youngsters. Hence Moussu T e lei Jovents. He is the captain of the band, the founder and the one with experience. Indeed, Tatou is also one of the founding members of the more famous Massilia Sound System with whom he is still active and still shares the same maritime territory: the Mediterranean and its Occitan heritage. “The underlying philosophy of our music is the same,” he says. “Our aim is to breathe new life into Occitan culture and fight the ongoing centralism in Paris with what we know best, i.e. music, and replace it with tolerance and multiculturalism. But musically speaking, what I am trying to do with Moussu is quite different.”