Part2. Keyboard Magazine, December ’92
The Navigations of Vangelis by Christian Jacob
Keyboard Magazine #61, December 1992
Translated by Piet Verhoeven
Background
Vangelis Papathanassiou has known for a long time that music is the best ship to discover new worlds. As an indefatigable traveler, he explores the archipelagos of modern music, the sunny winds and the perfume of sounds. And in 1992, at last, he meets Ch
ristopher Columbus ... While others discover only one continent, Vangelis likes to navigate islands and multiply the anchorages. Complex wake, elusive, where solitary waves and the collective rash deeds alter, the great maneuvers and the people with sty
le and refined elegance.
Vangelis, born in Greece, was raised with a piano. For his country, he guards the light and the spirituality, a poetry which is colored with nostalgia, the love for a thousand year-old tradition which has survived in the songs of the shepherds and the far
mers, quite remote from doubtful tunes of the Plaka, with it’s industrial brochettes and paltry bouzoukis.
Vangelis revives that luminous Greece, which has nowadays the strength of mirages, namely by his collaborations with Irene Papas, ‘Odes’ (1981) and ‘Rhapsodies’ (1986), where subtle musical textures surround magnificently interpreted popular chants. Vang
elis’s generous temperment has without any doubt to do with his Mediterranean roots, as is his lyric spirit, which manifests itself so well in the improvisations, the lightning fast impulses, the intuitive orchestrations which characterize his style.
From Lyre To Synths
Vangelis, the Greek, also comes from another country: pop music. In the sixties, he had his first successes with his group Phormynx (the lyre). But the dictatorship of the Colonels in 1968 rendered Greece unlivable and dangerous, and like many others Va
ngelis left in exile. He created Aphrodite’s Child in Paris together with the singer Demis Roussos. They would become an international success, especially with the double album.
The group breaks up in 1971 and Vangelis starts his solo career. But he never really gave up the interaction between musicians playing in a group and on his records, he would be surrounded by accomplices who brought him the music of a rare instrument or
simply the beauty of their voices. Vangelis also represents an astonishing suppleness in his methods of working: he enjoys his solitary experiments as much as his collaborations, in which his talent meets the talent of an other creator.
In 1974, people even thought he would become the new keyboardist of Yes; and the bacon of symphonic rock even did some repetitions with him. — Excerpt from ‘Galerij der Groten: Vangelis’ taken from ‘De Wending’: At that time, there were some wild specula
tions about Vangelis replacing Rick Wakeman in Yes. Jon Anderson, who had been a friend of Vangelis’ for a while, introduced him to the band. But when Vangelis saw the enormous drum set, he couldn’t resist and played a 15 minute solo. A solo which wasn
’t easy to forget. It rapidly became clear that there wouldn’t be much place for the other band members if they let Vangelis do his thing. Clearly too much ego.
Afterwards, he admitted that playing in a group wasn’t quite his cup of tea; he didn’t want to climb on stage each week and play the same keyboard pieces over and over again. He already had changed his way of working to a more creative way. — The attemp
t would fail, but Vangelis started a solid friendship with Jon Anderson: it resulted in a series of astonishing albums: Short Stories (1979), The Friends of Mr. Cairo (1981), Private Collection (1983) and in 1990 Page of Life : the listener can only be se
nsitive to the great complicity of these two sacred monsters, who bring together the best of their talents in compositions in which the play mingles with humor, great virtuosity and perfect efficiency.
Later on, the voice of Jon Anderson accompanied the synths of Tangerine Dream (Legend) and, recently, Kitaro. From his pop roots, Vangelis also kept his taste for a swinging kind of music, in which his latest solo album The City is a good example, with it
s sometimes heavy rhythms and sounds of distorted guitars.
Without doubt, one can show that an essential component in Vangelis’s talent came from those years of formation: the sense of melody, so rare in electronic music, which unlaces pertinent recallable lines from sonic textures, which can be sung.
Music For The Image
A man of collaborations, Vangelis had to meet people working with images. Frederic Rossif was the essential man in this: he permitted a new kind of alliance between music and film and prepared the soundtracks which would make the glory of Vangelis. L’Apo
calypse Des Animaux, La Fete Sauvage, Ignacio (Entends-Tu Les Chiens Aboyer?), L’Opera Sauvage are the sonorous beacons of a new way of filming the animal kingdom and creating poetry from it, dramatic lyric poetry. Music of strong emotions and moments of
grace, extreme delicacy of sounds and notes which touch every chord in our intimate sensitivity: in the animal films of Rossif, the language is superfluous. One can also find Vangelis on the soundtracks of Cantique Des Creatures (dedicated to painting)
and Nuremberg a Nuremberg (history of Nazism).
From the little screen to the big screen, it’s just a step, but a giant one for Vangelis. The score for the Hugh Hudson movie Chariots of Fire earns him an Oscar in Hollywood and immediately a place in the very select club of great soundtrack composers.
Vangelis had only followed his natural instinct, letting his melodic sense loose, in order to mix the emotion of his music with the emotion of the images.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner allowed him to make, besides some strong themes, the urban obsessed atmosphere of the futuristic Los Angeles, oozing through and hazy. A superb work, resting unreleased in it’s major part. Which is also the case with Missing
and The Bounty, but not with Antarctica or 1492: Conquest of Paradise (Ridley Scott, 1992) from which there were made albums.
One compilation
Themes reunites the best pieces from these different soundtracks. With Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992), ‘1492’ is the most recent work of Vangelis for the cinema, symphonic and lyric if you wish, with a visionary strength which solely fits to that of
the enlightened seaman Columbus.
If Vangelis brings to the cinema, the quintessence of his talent, and tenfolds the poetry, the emotional needs of the images by using melodic themes which haunt the spectator for a long time, the cinema will also influence his music. One could say that al
l the albums with Jon Anderson and discs such as See You Later or the The City are soundtracks of possible movies, with their plots, their sketches of scripts, their pieces of sonoric atmospheres, their references to the classics of cinema, seeing their n
oises which recall the golden age of polar. An other similarity could be the predominant role of an powerful kind of electronic music in which a lot of times Wagnerian choirs are mixed: the total releases a symphonic force, which doesn’t have to be envy
of (= is not at all inferior to) that of an acoustic orchestra; especially Mask (1985) and the last soundtracks.
The Synth Without The Technique
But, one can not reduce Vangelis’s work to his guidelines, pop music, the collaborations, his work for the movies ... Contrary to a good deal of musicians who have followed, during their career, determinated aesthetics (were they prisoners of their machi
nes?), Vangelis innovates, experiments, moves: in short, he explores and discovers. Without doubt because he is a musician, more than he is a real synthesizer player, whom he blames their computer interfaces which deprive the musician a part of his creati
vity. Vangelis never [ab-]used the mystification of technology. And paradoxically, he is one of the people who have used the greatest spectrum of possibilities of creating music offered by synthesizers. Heaven and Hell, Albedo 0.39 and Spiral explore so
me of the royal roads of the "classic" electronic music, floating or sequenced, but always showing an undeniable originality in proportion to the other gourous of the genre.
In 1978, with Beaubourg, Vangelis even adventures into the electro-acoustic abstraction, creating the most anti-commercial music possible, but of an fascinating beauty: rarely ever has the sound of synths been materialized in a visual way like this, combi
ning, crossing, flying away, flickering. That visionary hymn to modernity needs no envy of the work done at the IRCAM or GRM, and it has a human part. Invisible Connections in 1985, which was released on the prestigeous label Deutsche Grammophone, testifi
es the acknowledgement of Vangelis in the world of contemporary music. But far from locking himself up in a room, he opens new doors, creates an imaginary orient with China, explores the poetry of minimalism with Soil Festivities and rediscovers in 1987 t
he pleasure of playing synthesizers in a direct way, while the refinement of studio technics and the explosion of music software are influencing the creation methods of electronic musicians in depth.
Vangelis is most probably above all the power of an intuition which has tried to destroy all barriers between the idea and its execution: it’s the weight of the hands, the instinct of the gesture, the core of the sound, the buttons of the CS80 which react
by osmosis on the spirit of the composer, the direct recording, the first take which releases the most strong and right emotion, the absolute sincerity of a kind of music which is the mirror of the mind instead of that of the machines.
Going on means going far.
Going far means returning.
(TAO TE CHING)