“Whisk ! Don’t Churn!” -- Nicole Peyrafitte's CD & Live Performance at new York City’s LES performance space The Stone (published in March 2009)
Whisk ! Don’t Churn! is a live CD recording by performance artist (singer, cook, video and multi-media visual artist, poet, yoga athlete) Nicole Peyrafitte, with jazz bassist Michael Bisio. The notes to the CD jacket, written by Pierre Joris, calls this CD “an emulsion,” with “bass & voice whisking words & music” to form “an ongoing and challenging conversation based on” the performers’ “unconditional dedication to their chosen modes of expression.” Recorded at Justin’s in Albany, New York, last November, this CD is a wonderful contribution to hybrid and collaborative multi-media poetics and the arts. The CD, like all Peyrafitte’s work, is also multi-lingual. Although now a New Yorker, Peyrafitte was born and raised in the Pyrenees border region of southern France, and performs in three languages: French, Spanish, and English.) http://www.nicolepeyrafitte.com/
The CD’s experiments with sound, words, and their sonoric combinations are mesmerizing. They explore not only the range and power of Peyrafitte’s unique female voice, but they explore also the way in which the voice of a human body – as it locates itself in both in a range of tonalities and in within multiple-linguistic “settings” -- can yoke itself to the body of a bass that resounds from a wooden “belly.” Pieces in this lovely and original performance CD range from the bilingual “Arrive Ici / Come Here,” with words by Joris himself, to the fascinating series entitled “Le Calendrier / The Calendar,” whose “months” spring from, say, an diary entry by Mexican artist Frido Kahlo (called “August” and performed Spanish), or a traditional Pyrenean Song (“October”), or a quebecois feminist poem by Nicole Brossard. Later pieces include “Lune de Miel a Bagdad,” a haunting English translation of a poem by Mustapha Benfodil, whose lyrics crush with their poignant description of love in a state of war:
We met in Gaza . . .
We kissed in Beirut
We flew to Bagdad
We died under the bombs. . . .
. . . for the protection of high-risk love
and the continuation of passion . . . .
“America, America,” an adaptation of a poem by Saadi Youssef, is an equally mesmermizing piece, whose words perform a subtle critic of America’s dominant cultural homogeneity and fear of “the stranger,” as the poem states – or the Arab “other.” (It was written in 1992, right after the first Gulf War, as Peyrafitte notes, although it seems hauntingly arranged to be a post-9-11 critique.) Most original, perhaps, is Peyrafitte’s inclusion of “cooking” on the CD: her whipping of a metallic-sounding cream in “Duo for Crème Chantilly & Double Bass,” from which she derives the CD’s title phrase, “Whisk! Don’t Churn!” (We literally hear the whipping sound from the base of the bowl as she performs this action live.) Her humorous “vulva tribute” called “The Pearl of the Café,” for the feminists among us, is most winning – political and seductive at once. (“I am a Vulva Activist,” states Peyrafitte, on the CD to her live and laughing audience, just before she begins to sing.) The CD is a marvel of multi-media in a powerfully synthesized, artful form.
But – to truly appreciate Nicole Peyrafitte, you must see and hear her live. I had this pleasure earlier in New York City last spring, when I caught her warm-up gig during a jazz-poetry performance by Steve Dalachinsky at The Stone, on the Lower East Side. http://www.unlikelystories.org/old/archives/dalachinsky.html
Accompanied by Dalachinsky’s wonderful jazz drummer, Jim Pugliesi, (http://www.jimpugliese.org/pug.html), Peyrafitte cooked up several of these pieces from the CD, including “Emportez-moi” (based on Henri Michaux), one of the most haunting minor vocal pieces I’ve ever heard. And while she didn’t whip up any French chantilly that night at the Stone, Peyrafitte did one of her repertoire’s most athletic dance moves: the yoga asana adho mukha (headstand). Lithe and beautiful, strong with a voice that vibrates and ascends and weaves in and out of jazz rhythms – and with an international multi-cultural body of poetic works that embolden her both her aesthetic and politically activist bold stance, Peyrafitte’s art is worth the ticket. I say all this now, because Peyrafitte – again with her bassist Mike Bisio -- is performing this Saturday, May 16, for the official New York City release of Whisk! Don't Churn! at the Bowery Poetry Club.http://www.bowerypoetry.com/ If you love multi-media poetry, art and jazz, if you are in and around New York City, you should not miss it.