Dominique Ane, Sebastien Boisseau, Stephan Oliva, Sacha Toorop, Jean-Francois Mondot - Memento (2024)

Memento - Songs about Modiano
13 songs freely inspired by the world of novelist Patrick Modiano. Texts by Jean-François Mondot, music by Dominique Ané, with Sébastien Boisseau, Stephan Oliva and Sacha Toorop.
A journalist and jazz critic, Jean-François Mondot has long been a reader of Patrick Modiano, whose misty, nostalgic poetry he loves. In the spring of 2020, he embarked on a rather bold undertaking: to translate Modiano's fog into song. He immersed himself in his novels, rereading everything. The result is thirteen songs inspired by the writer's universe. They are linked together by a chronological thread. Step by step, from childhood to middle age, we follow a man who could sometimes be a dreamed Modiano, sometimes one of his characters. We imagine him in his twenties, writing in a smoky café, or living an impossible love affair in the Paris of the 60s.
Jean-François Mondot sends his texts to Dominique A, whose supple, embodied voice has long appealed to him. He was very lucky: the singer was also a Modiano reader. He decided not only to interpret the texts of this stranger, but also to write the music under his real name, Dominique Ané. To bring this project to fruition, he surrounded himself with two great figures of French and European jazz, pianist Stephan Oliva and double bassist Sébastien Boisseau, two musicians who know the weight of words as well as that of notes. Eclectic drummer Sacha Toorop, with his incomparable finesse of touch, completes the team. A final character will catalyze this adventure and give it substance: sound engineer Gérard de Haro, the man with the golden ears. The four musicians met in the hushed surroundings of the Buissonne studios, near Carpentras. Cut off from the outside world, they recorded their songs in just a few days, under live conditions. The result is an original project: thirteen literary songs carried by the vital pulse of jazz. Inhabited and inspired, the four musicians recreate the intimate atmosphere of songs that are confidences on the passage of time - or rather, the lack of it.