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CD Feature/ James Beaudreau: "Java St. Bagatelles"

  Tobias

First, you let your fingers wander over the delicately rough surface of the cover right until the edge, where they’ll stumble upon a piece of loosely attached heavy, brown cardboard.. Then you work your way towards the inside, carefully pulling out a dome-shaped protection bag made from the same silky-smooth material old vinyl records used to come in. With a sense of excitement, you allow the CD to slide out, glancing at its classic design and deep colours and then placing it on the tray. As you press play and the machine sucks in the silver disc, your eyes return to the cardboard booklet, delivering the message to your brain that James Beaudreau is a guitarist and designer living in New York and that this is his first solo album after a string of collaborations. But your magination has already taken over. You’re in Brooklyn now, roaming the pier of the old docks. This is Java Street.

There are 24 tracks of solo guitar music on this album, 20 of them completely improvised on the spot, recorded, archived, culled from the basement and then taped together for an imaginary walk. You can almost see James sitting in his sun-flooded kitchen, the guitar on his lap and his eyes gazing out to those red brick homes, houses standing side by side like over-sized shoe boxed someone forgot to take with him, to those tiny shops, Polish book stores, groceries, grafitti-sprayed walls, old buicks, delivery vans and to those myriads of colours and shapes. It is a neighbourhood filled with the memory of old glory, but life hasn’t stopped here. There is a rustling and bustling of noises in the air, cars driving by, people talking, doors being slammed and birds chirping. Some of these sounds can be heard on “Java St. Bagatelles”, not as a kind of post-production gag, but as the natural backdrop to these open-window sessions. And in this intense scenery, Beaudreau allows all of these elements to flow through him and to express themselves in his music. These are short pieces, some of them barely a minute long and they are full of an incredible freshness, richness and “realness”, of a directness and frankness which comes to you like a sympathetic stranger. On the surface, they appear to be calm, but underneath there is an unchanneled energy and liveliness just waiting to be released. The constantly changing rhythms, themes, motives, harmonic patterns, licks and melodies depict the constantly changing rhythm of life on the streets, their short-lived nature mirrors the ebb and flow of every-day scenes. There is no barrier between life and art here, the latter is the former and vice versa. If you walked by James’ appartment and you could hear him playing, that’d be the record, one moment in time captured in a flow of aural images and sounds.

So I decided to take this thing outside, put on my headphones and took for a walk. Again, the guitar become one with its surrounding, casting echoes from the walls of these houses, lending a dynamic to everything around me. I met some people, talked, went on. It was a bright day and my steps were light and happy. And as I walked, the snapshots of Manhattan which my mind and the internet had placed in me were replaced by the beauty of my own surroundings, of their immediacy and vivdness. There was no longer any barrier between myself and the music. Java Street was here, right here with me.

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: James Beaudreau