AEM020 Jean-Rene Ella

I won’t do this too often, I promise, but I’d like to use the begin­ning of this review as an oppor­tu­nity to climb up on my eth­no­mu­si­co­log­i­cal soap­box and do some good ol’ fash­ioned preach­ing. I’ve had this idea for a cou­ple years now that YouTube is the next evo­lu­tion of musi­cal trans­mis­sion, in so much as it’s become a vir­tual sub­sti­tute for the prover­bial front porch banjo les­son. But, instead of sit­ting cross-legged on the wooden floor while your used-to-be-a-coal-miner-until-he-got-the-ol’-black-lung-don’t-ya-know Grandpa walks you through the rudi­ments of how to play “Dar­ling Cora,” you get to sit in your box­ers, eat­ing Chi­nese left­overs, and work your way note by note through “StillJreming“‘s ren­di­tion of “Trou­ble in Mind.” You savvy read­ers already know this, but the inter­net has really done much more for music than merely piss off Lars Ulrich and encour­age 1TB hard drive sales; it’s com­pletely changed how music is passed down through gen­er­a­tions. Teenage kids have just as much access to tra­di­tional blues and gospel tunes as they have to punk and rock, and this incred­i­ble con­flu­ence of influ­ences is already lead­ing to some won­der­ful things.  How else could an organic chemist in Indi­ana come to have 30,000 views on his YouTube video of “Hard Time Killing Floor,” and inspire a lis­tener com­ment like “There’s so much soul leak­ing from the gui­tar that you could har­vest it, put it in mason jars then sell it for whole­sale pur­chase with great bar­gains.” The great unveil­ing: StillJRem­ing is Jean-Rene Ella, and though I’ve never met the man, he taught me how to play guitar.

Jean-Rene Ella is a cit­i­zen of the world in the truest sense. He grew up in Cameroon, Cen­tral Africa of a French-born mother and a father deeply moved by Amer­i­can blues and gospel. This alone is a recipe for musi­cal suc­cess: African polyrhythm com­bined with the struc­ture of tra­di­tional French folk tunes and the har­monic sense of the blues. Both par­ents were musi­cal, and Ella began lessons on flute at the age of 4, mov­ing first to piano and then finally gui­tar. For many years, his pri­mary musi­cal out­let was a small church gospel band, dur­ing which time he refined his musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties on the gui­tar, delv­ing deeply into the tra­di­tion of the negro spir­i­tual. In 1995 he moved to France and took up the role of singer and gui­tarist for a blues band called The Walkin’ Chairs, who can be heard on Side A of this 7-inch. The group toured the North East of France until Ella left to pur­sue a PhD in chem­istry in the United States. This marked the end of his ensem­ble career, and Ella’s musi­cal ven­tures have since been solo acts. For years he held a gig at a New Orleans estab­lish­ment called “The Neu­tral Ground Cof­fee House,” but despite his musi­cal incli­na­tions, his sci­en­tific mind drew him into acad­e­mia. By hap­pen­stance, dur­ing a vaca­tion in France in 2007 a friend intro­duced Ella to YouTube and joked, “Hey, you can play that song so much bet­ter and share it online like that.” They laughed, his friend flipped on a video cam­era, and Ella did exactly that. Two years later, more peo­ple have heard Ella play his gui­tar and sing than can fit in Giants Stadium.

When I con­tacted Jean-Rene Ella about doing an Ampeater 7-inch, I wasn’t too sure how he’d react. Was he a reclu­sive YouTube star like the renowned Fretkillr, or would he be gra­cious enough to lend his tal­ents to our mod­est lit­tle web­site? Well, Ella turns out to be as mag­nan­i­mous a human being as he is a musi­cian, and here we are with two stu­dio record­ings from a true mas­ter of his craft.  Side A fea­tures Ella’s group The Walkin’ Chairs play­ing an orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion called “Human River,” and Side B is an Ella solo per­for­mance of the tra­di­tional spir­i­tual “Wade in the Water.” “Human River” is a slow build with a deep groove. It’s easy to talk about this tune like it’s a blues spir­i­tual for a new era, but it’s not quite that. The Walkin’ Chairs aren’t mim­ic­k­ing or pay­ing homage to a tra­di­tional genre. Instead, they’re actu­ally part of it, they’re the real thing. There’s pain in this music, there’s intro­spec­tion, and it belongs not to a sin­gle soul but to all of human­ity. A solo gui­tar intro­duc­tion gives way to a full band arrange­ment replete with string bass, drums, and one truly fre­netic horn break. This tune might not grab some listeners–there’s no “hook.” The pri­mary con­trast is in Ella’s voice, con­stantly chang­ing in dynamic and tim­bre, reach­ing clear highs and deep growls. I love it, but if you’re look­ing for some­thing with a bit more appar­ent struc­ture, then Side B is your thing.

You’ve prob­a­bly heard this one before, per­formed by any­one from Mar­lena Shaw to Bob Dylan. Jean-Rene Ella gives us his own fin­ger­picked ren­di­tion of this clas­sic. He serves up both lead and har­mony vocals, cre­at­ing an effect akin to call and response that gives the tune a bril­liant full­ness. I was once told that there isn’t 1, nor 2, nor 3, but 5 sep­a­rate Michael Jack­son vocal per­sonas in “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” This might have had more to do with Quincy Jones’s enthu­si­as­tic pro­duc­tion than with any sort of philo­soph­i­cal deci­sion, but the idea is that each addi­tional voice responds to the prin­ci­ple voice as a par­tic­i­pant in the ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion of the song. “Wade in the Water” begins solo; a sec­ond voice enters in har­mony on the refrain “God’s gonna trou­ble the water”; that same voice then departs and reacts to the cho­rus with sub­tle “ohoh“s. For the rest of the song it darts in and out, switch­ing between har­mony and coun­ter­point, leav­ing room for both Ellas to swim through the tune together, react­ing and respond­ing. Yeah, I know this is a lit­tle bit “out there” for a music review, but when I lis­ten to Ella’s music, I sense some­thing truly pro­found, some­thing that asks me to lis­ten just a bit more care­fully than I oth­er­wise might. There’s no dis­so­nance here, no odd effects, no incred­i­ble pro­duc­tion, noth­ing to really set your ears aflame with curios­ity, but maybe the plain facade and can­did dis­po­si­tion of tra­di­tional music frees us to lis­ten a bit deeper into what we’re actu­ally hear­ing and to grap­ple with it on a more fun­da­men­tal level.

With that in mind, I leave you with some words from Ella him­self: “I think that the orig­i­nal sound of work songs, negro spir­i­tu­als and blues stayed with me because it felt so real. I’m not try­ing to sound cheesy or any­thing, but I could really feel the faith, or the pain or the joy in these songs, in that acoustic sound…something raw, unbi­ased, so I basi­cally felt I had no choice. My heart and my mind wouldn’t let me play the Blues or the Gospel any other way.”

Ben Heller

Side A — Human River Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Wade in the Water Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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