Street Clashes, Invented Dialects and Shows in Psychiatric Hospitals: France's Overlooked Music Movement of 1968

This seismic effect that the month of May 1968 influenced the French way of life has been widely chronicled. The student demonstrations, which broke out at the university prior to expanding across the land, quickened the demise of the Gaullist regime, radicalised French philosophy, and spawned a wave of avant-garde cinema.

Much less is known – beyond the country, at bare minimum – about how the transformative thoughts of 1968 expressed themselves musically in sound. One Australian musician and writer, for one, was aware of barely anything about French underground rock when he stumbled upon a collection of vintage vinyl, marked "French prog-rock" during a before Covid journey to Paris. He was astonished.

Below the underground … Christian Vander of Magma in 1968.

There was the group, the multi-personnel collective creating sound infused with a John Coltrane style and the orchestral feeling of the composer, all while singing in an invented dialect referred to as Kobaïan. There was another band, the electronic cosmic rock group established by the musician of Soft Machine. Another group embedded political phrases inside compositions, and yet another band created melodic compositions with explosions of flutes and percussion and flowing improvisations. "I hadn't experienced thrill like this after finding German experimental music in late the eighties," remembers the writer. "This was a genuinely hidden, rather than merely non-mainstream, culture."

This Australian-born musician, who experienced a amount of artistic accomplishment in the eighties with independent ensemble Full Fathom Five, completely developed passion with these groups, causing more trips, long interviews and now a volume.

Radical Foundations

His discovery was that France's musical transformation stemmed from a discontent with an already globalised English-speaking status quo: music of the 1950s and 60s in European the continent often were bland imitations of Stateside or English artists, such as French singers or Les Variations, French equivalents to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "They believed they had to sing in the language and appear like the Stones to be capable to make sound," the writer explains.

Further aspects contributed to the intensity of the moment. Before 1968, the North African war and the French state's severe suppression of protest had awakened a youth. A new breed of French music musicians were opposed to what they regarded as authoritarian surveillance system and the postwar administration. They were searching for innovative inspirations, free of American commercialized pulp.

Jazz Roots

The answer came in US jazz. Miles Davis was a frequent figure in the capital for years in the fifties and sixties, and artists of Art Ensemble of Chicago had sought refuge here from racial segregation and social constraints in the United States. Further guides were Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, as well as the innovative edges of rock, from Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, Soft Machine and the progressive band, to the experimental artist. The pattern-based minimalism of La Monte Young and the musician (the latter a Parisian denizen in the 1960s) was another element.

The musician at the Belgian gathering in 1969.

One band, part of the groundbreaking mind-altering music groups of the French non-mainstream movement, was created by the brothers Thierry and Fox Magal, whose family took them to the legendary Blue Note jazz club on Rue d'Artois as teenagers. In the end of 60s, amid performing jazz in bars like Le Chat Qui Pêche and travelling across India, the musicians came across another artist and Christian Vander, who later form Magma. The movement started to form.

Musical Transformation

"Groups like Magma and Gong had an instant impact, motivating additional artists to form their own ensembles," explains Thompson. Vander's group invented an entire category: a fusion of experimental jazz, orchestral rock and neoclassical sound they named the genre, a expression representing approximately "cosmic power" in their made-up dialect. It still draws together groups from throughout Europe and, most notably, Japan.

Subsequently occurred the urban confrontations, started following learners at the university's Nanterre branch resisted against a prohibition on mixed-gender student housing interaction. Almost every artist discussed in the volume participated in the uprisings. Several musicians were creative individuals at the art school on the Left Bank, where the Atelier Populaire created the now-famous May 68 images, with phrases such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Beauty is on the streets").

Youth spokesperson the figure speaks to the Paris crowd subsequent to the clearing of the Sorbonne in the month of May 1968.