• Walking Shoes
  

Festival de Châteauvallon - August 26, 1971

 LINER NOTES

We are endebted to the Geneva school for Daniel Humair. We may say 'school', as the one in Geneva is no worse than any other. Humair was so unruly that he developed ways of skiving school : drumming rhythms to make all four limbs independent, and drawing graffiti in time with his impulsions. From an innocent-looking pupil at the back of the class has come an important painter and one of the greatest drummers in the world.

Sometimes when listening to him, I ask myself why I prefer him to all the others. My answer is always the same; because he plays with such a unique fusion of power, delicacy and presence of mind. Yes, Daniel Humair's is the best sounding percussion you can hear today. If you have seen Humair playing, you will know how dazzlingly graceful, refined and elegant his motion is. But these words suggest frail calligraphy, the sly gait of a cat. To describe this percussion in words and images, we must add the seething energy of a wave breaking by Hokusai. The power that raises the music inside the musicians own body, lifting him above himself - jazzmen call it 'drive'. Humair has a lion's share of this strength that carries you, pleasantly, and pushes you, ferociously. (The musical illustration of this is in what happens between Humair and Eddy Louiss in Au Privave. Who urges on the other ? Impossible to say. Both are mutually galvanised).

He who has played with everyone says he has one great regret: he does not know how it feels with Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis, both formidable catalysts. Here on the tracks of this album recorded live (i.e. with the beauty in motion that admits no atonement), you can hear how Humair's personal brand of drive propels the most disparate musicians, from Eric Dolphy to Gerry Mulligan, from Rene Thomas to Joachim Kuhn, to comparable states of jubilation. And, from the first to the last of these tracks which span a period of twenty-three years, you can hear the dream drummer. Humair's inventiveness crackle like fire, roll like a comber, and move like the spirit. Here then, is the prodigy we owe to the school; will-power dreaming, the unprecedented alliance of water and fire.

MICHEL CONTAT