Joël Robuchon Küche

Douze nouvelles et un poème écrits par les auteurs des éditions La Geste et les amis de J. Nivard afin de rendre hommage à l'écrivain, décédé le 19 février 2023…

Love remains…In 1993, three musicians from Sweden, Esbjörn Svensson, Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström formed the band e.s.t.. Svensson and Öström had known each other ever since their first steps into music as children. Neither of them could have anticipated that e.s.t. would become the most influential band in European jazz of the noughties. And when the band formed they probably didn't think they were particularly ‘jazz’ either; all they wanted to do was to play the music which united their passions: rock, pop, classical, folk, improvisation. In the following 15 years, e.s.t. would play thousands of concerts worldwide, release ten studio albums and several live recordings, win awards, gold discs. We all know how the story ends.

Billy Joel teamed with Phil Ramone, a famed engineer who had just scored his first producing hits with Art Garfunkel's Breakaway and Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years for The Stranger, his follow-up to Turnstiles. Joel still favored big, sweeping melodies, but Ramone convinced him to streamline his arrangements and clean up the production. The results aren't necessarily revelatory, since he covered so much ground on Turnstiles, but the commercialism of The Stranger is a bit of a surprise…

There's a reason Turnstiles begins with the Spector-esque epic "Say Goodbye to Hollywood." Shortly after Streetlife Serenade, Joel ditched California – and, by implication, sensitive Californian soft rock from sensitive singer/songwriters – for his hometown of New York. "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" was a celebration of his move, a repudiation of his past, a fanfare for a new beginning, which is exactly what Turnstiles was. He still was a singer/songwriter – indeed, "Summer, Highland Falls" was his best ballad to date, possibly his best ever – but he decided to run with his musical talents, turning the record into a whirlwind tour of pop styles, from Sinatra to Springsteen.

One would think that, with the current feelings about the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, there would be frequent stagings throughout the country of Kurt Weill's JOHNNY JOHNSON, his awe-inspiring anti-war "play with songs" and his first work for the American theater. (Not coincidentally, where are all productions of Joan Littlewoood's OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR and the Gershwin/Kaufman STRIKE UP THE BAND?)