The accordion came later

The accordion came later…”In 1989, with the release of their first album, the T?s Raides became part of a loose movement that had probably begun eight years earlier with the surprise chart success of the classical accordionist and rock pasticheur G?rd Blanchard, and gathered momentum. First there was the Latin craze, and then rock – but then it began to change in the Eighties…”"I was at art school then,” says Christian Olivier, leader of the T?s Raides, taking up the story, “studying to go into advertising and listening to Anglo-Saxon rock – I started out doing Clash and Stones covers, in English, and then I started to write songs in French, and the importance of the poetry of the text drew me into the traditions of French song. “I wasn’t affected so much as I was working with Brel, but lots of my friends lost all their dance work. Where traditional chanson values are to be evoked, the accordion is de rigueur, and it’s a sign of the times that Corti is now much in demand with a new young clientele.”The Sixties and Seventies were bad for accordionists,” he says. If anyone is proof of the regenerative power of chanson, it’s Corti.Around the table with him, finishing off the wine, lighting cigarettes and chatting boisterously, are sundry members of the T?s Raides, the group with whom Corti now shares a good part of his professional life, whose record label, Mon Slip (My Underpants), has just put out Corti’s first solo record.

“It’s funny,” says Jean Corti, finishing his after-lunch espresso in a caf?n the rue St-Antoine in Paris, “people are always talking about a return of chanson, and when you encounter it, it’s as if it never went away…”

“It’s funny,” says Jean Corti, finishing his after-lunch espresso in a caf?n the rue St-Antoine in Paris, “people are always talking about a return of chanson, and when you encounter it, it’s as if it never went away…”
Corti, born 67 years ago in Bergamo, Italy, has spent almost half a century as one of France’s top chanson accordionists, most notably as accompanist to the great Jacques Brel until the singer’s death in 1978. Then one remembers Stravinsky’s injunction, that composers ultimately “have a duty toward music, namely, to invent it.”More details of Michael Berkeley’s lecture on .uk. For those who continue to believe in the Western ideal of composition, at best, as a means of revealing aspects of human thought and feeling that can be grasped and articulated in no other way, this third path could well prove the least rewarding of all. But in the last resort, they depend more upon the abilities of a composer as an animateur, even as a social worker, than upon his or her creative individuality.

The support that composers can expect from that quarter, therefore, will doubtless remain restricted.Yet then the likeliest immediate development seems to be along a third path which Berkeley touched on when he noted the increasing tendency of funding bodies to direct what music subsidies they still have less into commissions than into “outreach” programmes – sending composers and performers into schools, prisons and whatnot to try to raise the interest of the young and the marginalised in creativity and new music.At best, such activities can achieve positive results and may indeed seem to fulfil Britten’s ideal of being musically useful to the community. Accordingly, genuinely participatory musical experience epitomised by Britten’s “holy triangle” is increasingly being subverted or replaced by the passive stimulation of pleasing background music, or foreground music – Glass, Nyman, Adams – composed out of the same bland cliches.”If, as it seems, the industry must win, then the cultural revolution will have been accomplished,” concluded Goehr. An FA spokesman said: “We can confirm that this is the situation and we have an investigation ongoing.”The FA is treading very cautiously as positive nandrolone tests have been a source of huge controversy in the past. A professional footballer has tested positive for the anabolic steroid nandrolone for the first time in England.
The Football Association is investigating the positive test, which occurred within the last three months, and are keeping the identity of the player secret until the inquiry has been completed. The Football Association chief executive Adam Crozier tonight announced his resignation amid the fall–out from a dispute with the Premier League.
The issue came to a head following calls from the Premier League for a ‘professional game board’ to be established, a move which Crozier opposed as he believed it would weaken the role of the FA.Following talks with FA chairman Geoff Thompson this week, Crozier felt that his position was untenable and has therefore handed in his notice..

Only a flying save from Dudek prevented him confirming that impression with a spectacular goal. Anyone unconvinced by their quality should have been persuaded when Miguel Angulo came on. Curro Torres broke down the right, Carew laid his cross back and Rufete’s shot was deflected past Dudek by Sami Hyypia. Kily Gonzalez almost shocked Jerzy Dudek when his deep left-wing cross drifted over the keeper’s head and onto the crossbar. After a bright opening from Liverpool, during which Carlos Marchena blocked Salif Diao’s shot, the Spaniards quickly settled into their close-passing game.