Télérama, February 8, 1995
by Stéphane Jarno
Translated by me
After the father (Tim), the son, the announced myth of American rock. Thanks to "Grace", his latest album, and his exceptional voice.
The youthful ardour, the height of vision and especially the ability to solve inextricable problems. In a single album, Grace, 27-year-old American Jeff Buckley avoided repeating and clichés. A feat achieved in the purest forms of art, with the eternal formation, guitars, bass, drums. The result is surprising, both neoclassical, since it assumes the musical heritage of the last three decades, and at the same time modern, because it is free from the originals. This means that Jeff Buckley's music, under familiar guise, resembles nothing known. So much so that it is attributed with disparate influences: Led Zeppelin, Cure, T-Rex, Queen, Robert Fripp or John Cale...The more signposts there are, the more lost we get.
As if this avalanche of putative fathers were not enough, there is also the civil status. When you are the offspring and the spitting image of Tim Buckley, considered one of the major artists on the rock scene in the 70s, it is hard to believe that you are anything other than your father's son: "Not only is it easy, but it's also completely unfair. He left six months after I was born, I was raised by my mother in California. I only met my father once, when I was 8 years old. He died in 1975, I don't even have his albums, I listened to them when I was a kid and later, at 17-18 years old, when I wanted to know who he was. I have a very personal relationship with him and that's my business. As for artistic proximity, I feel much closer to James Hettfield (the guitarist of Metallica, the famous American heavy metal band) than to Tim Buckley..."
The only kinship he claims is that of the great singers, these exceptional voices, to which our man devotes a particular cult: "For me, musical genres don't really matter, what really matters is the voice I hear, the soul that expresses itself. Maria Callas, Hank Williams, Marvin Gaye, Edith Piaf, Robert Plant, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn or Nina Simone, they are the same family. The voice is a sound, but it is also what we have experienced, that gives truth to the words. That's why there are songs that only actors can sing."
This does not prevent him from often performing covers as eclectic and inspired by Leonard Cohen (Hallelujah) or Van Morrison (The Way Young Lovers Do), Elton John or Porgy and Bess, Gershwin's opera. Because on stage, Buckley Junior is capable of anything. And if he likes to joke between two heart-rending songs, it's not out of lightness, but to relieve the tension and show that he's not so different from the people who came to listen to him.
Little Jeff didn't forget that he was playing, until recently, in the back rooms of New York's arty pubs, and that was enough for his happiness. He does not rule out coming back to it one day. Probably because "the rising star of American rock", as the newspapers call him, is above all an authentic idealist who speaks of music as a quest and not as a slot machine.
by Stéphane Jarno
Translated by me
After the father (Tim), the son, the announced myth of American rock. Thanks to "Grace", his latest album, and his exceptional voice.
The youthful ardour, the height of vision and especially the ability to solve inextricable problems. In a single album, Grace, 27-year-old American Jeff Buckley avoided repeating and clichés. A feat achieved in the purest forms of art, with the eternal formation, guitars, bass, drums. The result is surprising, both neoclassical, since it assumes the musical heritage of the last three decades, and at the same time modern, because it is free from the originals. This means that Jeff Buckley's music, under familiar guise, resembles nothing known. So much so that it is attributed with disparate influences: Led Zeppelin, Cure, T-Rex, Queen, Robert Fripp or John Cale...The more signposts there are, the more lost we get.
As if this avalanche of putative fathers were not enough, there is also the civil status. When you are the offspring and the spitting image of Tim Buckley, considered one of the major artists on the rock scene in the 70s, it is hard to believe that you are anything other than your father's son: "Not only is it easy, but it's also completely unfair. He left six months after I was born, I was raised by my mother in California. I only met my father once, when I was 8 years old. He died in 1975, I don't even have his albums, I listened to them when I was a kid and later, at 17-18 years old, when I wanted to know who he was. I have a very personal relationship with him and that's my business. As for artistic proximity, I feel much closer to James Hettfield (the guitarist of Metallica, the famous American heavy metal band) than to Tim Buckley..."
The only kinship he claims is that of the great singers, these exceptional voices, to which our man devotes a particular cult: "For me, musical genres don't really matter, what really matters is the voice I hear, the soul that expresses itself. Maria Callas, Hank Williams, Marvin Gaye, Edith Piaf, Robert Plant, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn or Nina Simone, they are the same family. The voice is a sound, but it is also what we have experienced, that gives truth to the words. That's why there are songs that only actors can sing."
This does not prevent him from often performing covers as eclectic and inspired by Leonard Cohen (Hallelujah) or Van Morrison (The Way Young Lovers Do), Elton John or Porgy and Bess, Gershwin's opera. Because on stage, Buckley Junior is capable of anything. And if he likes to joke between two heart-rending songs, it's not out of lightness, but to relieve the tension and show that he's not so different from the people who came to listen to him.
Little Jeff didn't forget that he was playing, until recently, in the back rooms of New York's arty pubs, and that was enough for his happiness. He does not rule out coming back to it one day. Probably because "the rising star of American rock", as the newspapers call him, is above all an authentic idealist who speaks of music as a quest and not as a slot machine.
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