Actually it was the other way around as Paris Obscur performed last night but he brought everybody at Cat's Art MusikCircus back to Paris with him.
With many performers you may hear a promoter say he or she has such a pretty voice but Paris does not have a pretty voice, rather he has a beautiful one. There is a gulf of difference in the same way Picasso's "Guernica" goes beyond a simple landscape. (Wiki: Guernica)
Paris Obscur is a French composer / songwriter and all of his work is original. He has done some covers but he doesn't typically bring them to his performances. Last night he didn't even bring a play list and for the same reason I don't: it's too confining. Instead he wanted to follow the flow of stories and the songs for as long as needed and this turned into a performance that ran over an hour and a half.
Paris will tell you his music is in a genre of dark romance and his understanding of human nature would be a credit to a clinical psychologist but that field wouldn't be enough for him. His music is as much therapy for him as it is for those who hear it. While some of his songs can be massively troubling and depressing, there is a purgative aspect to this as they bring those feelings to the surface. That may not seem like such a good thing but one cannot cure a problem if it hides at the bottom of your soul chewing your psyche. Paris brings it up where you can see it and hopefully deal with it.
It may seem flip to start playing with the MusikCircus equipment during a performance like this but it's not at all as everything there is about experience and lifting it as far as it can possibly go. It lifted Yolly Horgold onto the high-wire:
Yolly wanted to experience at all so she kept on experimenting:
All the while, Paris was singing and before his performance of "The Last Letter" he told the story the song would reveal. There were two brothers, one of whom became a rapist and a girl he raped became pregnant. The other brother lived a life of love with a wife who also became pregnant but she miscarried and lost the baby. Her devastation was so great that she committed suicide. The song was written from the standpoint of the wife as she wrote the letter to her husband and Paris gives a masterful rendition.
Perhaps you wonder how many people would go to a show featuring such a dark story but the answer is quite a few.
It requires a sophisticated taste to enjoy such a performance but you can see above that such a taste is not a rare thing.
"The Last Letter" moved me deeply relative to miscarriages those I love have experienced and miscarriages in my own life, most particularly the Galactic Peace Tour as it miscarried more violently, more brutally, and with more personal devastation than anything ever did in my life. There is no chance of another 'pregnancy' but the importance of the song is in recognising that fact as it has to be packaged up and thrown away if there is ever to be any chance of any kind of 'baby' again. There are also the larger miscarriages of justice in the United States, most of which take place to the thunderous applause of a soporific crowd but that takes this review out to a level of philosophy that isn't needed to tell the story.
In many ways, Paris Obscur's music is jazz, not in terms of using exotic scales of music but rather in terms of exotic or discordant scales of emotion. It may very well be that the French and the Germans are more hip to jazz as in America the subject of jazz will get a response of, "Oh yeah, Miles Davis fantastic, isn't he."
Of course Miles Davis is fantastic but that's not the final extent of jazz. In Europe, even circus clowns know jazz and Paris Obscur is the Darkest Clown of all.
An Artist Profile has been created for Paris Obscur on Cat's Art MusikCircus Web site and you can visit his official Web site to discover more about Paris Obscur.
And all the while Cat and I danced:
The heart behind the stage says it silently that Paris Obscur's performance, despite the darkness, is all about love in its most powerful extremes and most elemental components.
With many performers you may hear a promoter say he or she has such a pretty voice but Paris does not have a pretty voice, rather he has a beautiful one. There is a gulf of difference in the same way Picasso's "Guernica" goes beyond a simple landscape. (Wiki: Guernica)
Paris Obscur is a French composer / songwriter and all of his work is original. He has done some covers but he doesn't typically bring them to his performances. Last night he didn't even bring a play list and for the same reason I don't: it's too confining. Instead he wanted to follow the flow of stories and the songs for as long as needed and this turned into a performance that ran over an hour and a half.
Paris will tell you his music is in a genre of dark romance and his understanding of human nature would be a credit to a clinical psychologist but that field wouldn't be enough for him. His music is as much therapy for him as it is for those who hear it. While some of his songs can be massively troubling and depressing, there is a purgative aspect to this as they bring those feelings to the surface. That may not seem like such a good thing but one cannot cure a problem if it hides at the bottom of your soul chewing your psyche. Paris brings it up where you can see it and hopefully deal with it.
It may seem flip to start playing with the MusikCircus equipment during a performance like this but it's not at all as everything there is about experience and lifting it as far as it can possibly go. It lifted Yolly Horgold onto the high-wire:
Yolly wanted to experience at all so she kept on experimenting:
All the while, Paris was singing and before his performance of "The Last Letter" he told the story the song would reveal. There were two brothers, one of whom became a rapist and a girl he raped became pregnant. The other brother lived a life of love with a wife who also became pregnant but she miscarried and lost the baby. Her devastation was so great that she committed suicide. The song was written from the standpoint of the wife as she wrote the letter to her husband and Paris gives a masterful rendition.
Perhaps you wonder how many people would go to a show featuring such a dark story but the answer is quite a few.
It requires a sophisticated taste to enjoy such a performance but you can see above that such a taste is not a rare thing.
"The Last Letter" moved me deeply relative to miscarriages those I love have experienced and miscarriages in my own life, most particularly the Galactic Peace Tour as it miscarried more violently, more brutally, and with more personal devastation than anything ever did in my life. There is no chance of another 'pregnancy' but the importance of the song is in recognising that fact as it has to be packaged up and thrown away if there is ever to be any chance of any kind of 'baby' again. There are also the larger miscarriages of justice in the United States, most of which take place to the thunderous applause of a soporific crowd but that takes this review out to a level of philosophy that isn't needed to tell the story.
In many ways, Paris Obscur's music is jazz, not in terms of using exotic scales of music but rather in terms of exotic or discordant scales of emotion. It may very well be that the French and the Germans are more hip to jazz as in America the subject of jazz will get a response of, "Oh yeah, Miles Davis fantastic, isn't he."
Of course Miles Davis is fantastic but that's not the final extent of jazz. In Europe, even circus clowns know jazz and Paris Obscur is the Darkest Clown of all.
An Artist Profile has been created for Paris Obscur on Cat's Art MusikCircus Web site and you can visit his official Web site to discover more about Paris Obscur.
And all the while Cat and I danced:
The heart behind the stage says it silently that Paris Obscur's performance, despite the darkness, is all about love in its most powerful extremes and most elemental components.
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