Composer, musician and producer Joseph Chester releases his new album, Au Revoir Tristesse, on 13 June via Bohemia Records, and will play in the Kevin Barry Room at the NCH on the same date. We asked Joseph the BIG questions . . .
Commissioned by Axis Ballymun and Arts Council of Ireland, Au Revoir Tristesse is a suite of five pieces for classical guitar inspired by French author Françoise Sagan's debut novel, Bonjour Tristesse.
A veteran of the Irish music scene, Joseph has worked with Gemma Hayes, The Waterboys, Sinéad O Connor, Ten Speed Racer, The Hedge Schools, and released critically acclaimed solo albums and is also a member A Lazarus Soul.
Au Revoir Tristesse continues his journey into classical guitar, which he began with guitar and strings album LUCIA, his homage to Lucia Joyce, daughter of James.
Speaking about the new album, Joseph says, "Au Revoir Tristesse is a homage to sadness in five movements. Our society is constantly telling us that if we are not happy that something must be wrong. But in fact, to live a full life, we must feel the whole spectrum of human emotions.
"Besides, sadness can be beautiful and can teach us so much. We tend to think of it as the opposite of happiness but I think of sadness as being so much more than mere ordinary unhappiness."
Tell us three things about yourself . . .
I'm a musician, I'm from Dublin and I live in France.
How would you describe your music?
To quote Bob Dylan, "It used to go like that, now it goes like this." I released six albums of songs but after my album Jupiter's Wife, which came out in 2020, I felt that although my songs were getting longer and longer, and more lyrically complex, I often felt like I still had more to say. I became interested in the idea that perhaps it's possible to say more with no words at all. And so, I set about working on purely instrumental music, beginning with LUCIA, a portrait in music of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James. It has been my experience that there are things music can say which words cannot.
Who are your musical inspirations?
When I was growing up, Christy Moore, Andy Irvine and Donal Lunny were like the Holy Trinity. In fact, I see now that, although they were great musical influences on me, they also shaped my worldview. Having met and talked with Christy and Andy in later life, it dawned on me that they also influenced my politics which is something I'm very grateful to them for. They made me a good socialist!
The first time I heard Lou Reed's New York album was like a curtain falling. I had been listening to Dylan of course, which was like beat poetry set to music (although the non-linear storytelling of Tangled Up In Blue was something else) but hearing the opening line of New York - "Caught between the twisted lines, the plotted maps the faulty lines that brought Columbus to New York . . . " - I thought, wow you can do that? Reed's songs were like distilled novels. All of human life was there. Listen to Rock Minuet from Ecstasy and you'll see what I mean.
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These days, I listen to JS Bach every day, in fact, I try to play at least one piece of his every day, There's something in the eternal logic of his music that seems to recalibrate the brain and straighten out the neurons. It calms me. If it could be said that the universe has a language, it must surely be mathematics. Bach's music is so mathematically rigorous that it is truly universal. Listening to Bach is like listening to the universe speaking.
What was the first gig you ever went to?
My first experience of live music was Neil Diamond in Croke Park, 1984. Just me, my Nanny O'Brien and a pair of binoculars.
What was the first record you ever bought?
A seven-inch single of Planxty's Timedance, which was a piece they wrote for the interval of the Eurovision song contest in 1981. It had Nancy Spain on the B-side. I was nine years old. My first album was The Brendan Voyage, Shaun Davey's miraculous suite for uilleann pipes and orchestra with Liam O'Flynn on the pipes. I still have it as well as a cassette of Granuaile, which Shaun signed for me when I was twelve or thirteen.
What's your favourite song right now?
It's not a song but my current obsession is John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. I seem to listen to it every day at the moment. There is as much music in Elvin Jones's ride cymbal as there is in McCoy Tyner's piano, Jimmy Garrison's bass and Coltrane's sax. Some genius transcribed and scored all four parts so I try to follow the score as I listen. Coltrane could have been a twentieth century Bach.
Favourite lyric of all time?
An impossible question. Perhaps for the moment we are living in, I think of Dylan's Masters of War, which he wrote when he was just 22 years old: "And I hope that you die, And your death will come soon, I'll follow your casket, By the pale afternoon, And I'll watch while you're lowered, Down to your deathbed, And I'll stand over your grave, 'Til I'm sure that you're dead".
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Or perhaps even better, his Seven Curses which was based on an ancient folk song collected by Professor Child, known as The Maid Freed From the Gallows which has turned up everywhere from Hungary to Sicily and Scandinavia and which was sung by Andy Irvine as Streets of Derry. In Dylan's version: "These be seven curses on a judge so cruel, That one doctor can't not save him, That two healers cannot heal him, That three eyes cannot see him, That four ears cannot hear him, That five walls cannot hide him, That six diggers cannot bury him, And that seven death shall never kill him."
If you could only listen to one song for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Contrapunctus 14 from Bach's Art of Fugue. There is a lifetime of listening in that one piece. It was the last piece he wrote and the first time he wrote his own name into the music. It stops suddenly near the end and it's said that this is the moment he passed away. It is the most exquisite silence in all of music.
Where can people find your music/more information?
I have a website, a newsletter on Substack, and people can support me on Patreon.
Alan Corr
