It's difficult to know what to say to a drummer of the calibre of Christian Vander - partly because his drumming is on a plane far beyond that of any drummer I have yet encountered, and partly because he can only understand a few words of English.
It's remarkable how hard it becomes when one attempts to interview someone through an interpreter (in this case Giorgio Gomelsky, manager and producer of Vander's French band, Magma).
To start with, the tradition of relaxing ones subject with a little idle chatter and a few humorous remarks can be forgotten altogether. There's no way you can make small talk through an interpreter.
I thought at first that I might still have enough French to do without Giorgio. No way. That stuff they teach you for O-level is useless except for passing exams with.
MAGMA was formed five years ago by Christian, who decided it was time (that at least someone) in France made a stand for rock and perhaps made some music that stretched its boundaries a little.
You see, the French don't like innovation in art any more. They like it all the way it was. Society itself is very conservative. All right, the kids like a few new sounds, but the French music industry, steeped as it is in a tradition of Chansant, Reinhardt and the classics, just imports what it needs from here and the States.
They've never seen anything commercial in domestic rock. (Well there isn't anything commercial, but that's not the point, is it?) Anyway, Christian and ses amies decided to kick contre this and put together a little combo that now, alors, is actuallement commercial - un peu.
Voila, une feuille de copy et je n'as pas mon cahier ouvert. Ou est mon cahier? Qui a half-inched me note book? Sheeeet! Oh yes, it's an education reading my stuff. Before he formed Magma, Christian was a session drummer with a number of jazz and R & B bands. How did he manage to get such an avant-garde band together out of a country of musicians usually so apathetic where modem rhythms are concerned? (Or perhaps just pathetic - or pathetique, though I think that loses something in translation).
Sans pun, I wait while this question is translated into French and then the answer comes in fits and starts: Christian says: "None of the band are really French... the people he gets together with as musicians... Michael Graillier (keyboards) is North African of French extraction... Klaus (vocals) is Basque... Jannick (bass) is Polish, German and English... Gerard (keyboards) is Lithuanian... Christian is three-quarters German and a quarter Polish. His Polish grandfather was a gypsy."
Actually, there's a lot of Gypsy about Christian. He looks itinerant. He's a very restless person at the best of times. One suspects he's violent, contemptuous, slightly superhuman and constantly fighting to hold back something evil inside him. Which could all be completely wrong - just another bunch of things that got lost in translation.
Christian started, playing drums at 11. He started playing percussion instruments when he was very young, accompanying Stravinsky, Bartok and Bach... "But I wasn't influenced by Jacques Loussier." he hastens to add.
"I was not living with my parents at 11. I had no official tuition. But the only person who taught me was Elvin Jones. Chet Baker gave me "my first drum kit. He was living with my mother and playing with a group in Paris.
"He saw I wanted a drum kit and he took me to the club he was playing and came out with a drum kit and said: 'that's for you.'
"Six months later the police came round. It was a kit he had hired for the gig and hadn't taken back so it had been reported stolen."
Christian has something of a history of hiring drum kits. The next kit he had he hired himself. "I forgot to take it back. They fined me £200."
By 11 he had got off the Bach and Stravinsky and was into Ray Charles. He practised between seven and nine hours a day. He still does. The kit he has now is a Gretsch. "I prefer it. The sound is more precise. It is more tuneable and it has a bigger and harder sound." It consists of a bass drum, a bass tom-tom, a high tom-tom and a snare. He also has a hi-hat and seven cymbals, all Zildjian. The snare drum stand is a Hollywood, which he believes in implicitly, the hi-hat stand is an Orange. The bass-drum pedal is a Cameo, which was custom, made for Elvin Jones. It's operated by a bicycle chain mechanism. The remaining cymbal stands are Ludwig.He uses a lot of weights around the kit to hold it steady. He has 320lb. on the hi-hat and 40 to 60lb. per cymbal stand.
His playing uses the different sounds of the various percussive effects he can get from the kit rather than just pounding out a basic rhythm. He is a very rare creature. A successful front-man drummer.
'It depends on the pieces. Magma is going to get into a different thing musically. I shall probably play much stronger rhythms. The drums are a melodic instrument. They can be very flat if they are not tuned properly. All the cymbals are tuned."
Magma has now been accepted very well in France. It is probably the most respected band by followers of jazz, classical and rock and roll. In France the band, which the industry once ignored, now sells enough albums to be a commercial proposition. Nor is it a band that attracts just the head freaks and the middle-aged intelligentsia. The majority of the audience is between 15 and 16. The kids are starved of music with meat in it and Magma fills that gap. There are now a few other bands in France doing the same sort of thing. Two former Magma members have now formed a band called Zao. In America to date their reception has been OK, but there is a tendency for people there to think the music is pretentious.
"It's a music of our times. People spend too much time on a particular form of expression. It was listening to Coltrane that made me want to put the band together; although the music is nothing like Coltrane's. "It was because he is a very spiritual musician. In the last three or four years I have not listened to very much new music, apart from McLaughlin who is also a spiritual musician. "I also listen to Wagner because he is spiritual. He wrote amazing melodies that go higher and higher. At the time people were saying that Wagner was grandiose. But they were wrong, it was spiritual."
What does he mean by spiritual? 'It's not inspired by material, earthly things. The inspiration comes from high above. Rock and roll is not spiritual. When you play it you look down at the earth. Spiritual music you draw your inspiration from above."
So where does that put yer soul and yer funk, yet actual Negro, back to the jungle boogie? Negro music is unconsciously spiritual. It appears to be very earthy, but these people have not lost their spiritual potential. They unconsciously, without knowing, are a link with the universe. It's sometimes difficult to detect because of the commercialism. "I feel very strongly that Negro music is not immaterial at all Six or seven years ago I listened to a lot of Tamla Motown - Junior Walker, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes. I didn't understand the words, but I felt the music was spiritual." Perhaps if he had heard the words he would have changed his mind. To Christian they were singing about higher things. In fact, they were singing about screwing each other. But there again, maybe he's right. I always thought there was something very spiritual about screwing. This language problem - that of never being able to understand the words to Western music - has led to a strange thing in Magma. Both the musicians and the audiences in France are used to having their rock and jazz with the vocals playing a purely instrumental part.
As a result, Christian has invented a new language which has quite a limited vocabulary and concerns itself with the goings on in a Sci-Fi / fantasy world called Kobaļa.
The band also acts as a kind of travelling panacea for loneliness. Christian believes that the music, to be successful, should draw the audience together. He wants people to de-isolate themselves. After concerts in France the band stays on stage and talks to people in the audience.
"Wherever you go there are the same sort of people. They have the same problems. I collect telephone numbers and put all these people in touch with each other."