Two voices at once: Tina Turner, obviously, was endowed with an unparalleled timbre that is no more. The next day, learning of the death of Jean-Louis Murat strikes and astonishes in the same way: here is a voice that we will no longer hear and which, in the atmosphere of French song, resonated differently, adopted a rather singular outline that navigated between the tessitura, despite a vocal color recognizable among thousands.
A signature
Murat's voice, therefore, was a signature, even beyond his music, compositions, arrangements. What was she exactly? A path, first, between genres. His voice allowed him to get out of the agreed frameworks of song, pop and rock. By setting a tone, also adopting the inflections of a regional accent (Auvergne, aligot), JLM created a territory of his own, a kingdom of his voice, his song.
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He also circulated through genres, using his singing not so much as an argument of the masculine but as a weapon to disable presuppositions: his rough force was permanently counterbalanced by a resolutely feminine way of putting things down, of taking the time and of being in the darkness of voices, oscillating between the ways of laying the language, The words, the phrasing that often vibrates. And then, also, this way of being in a world with others, highlighting other musicians as in the album Mustango where he quotes PJ Harvey in the song Polly Jean and the group Calexico in the song of the same name.
Singing about fragility
In the end, Murat's strength was to live between the poles, to create a ground in which he could sing all his fragility, with the accents of masculine and feminine. In this, he was emblematic of a generation of musicians, English, American, New Zealander, French appeared in the 1980s who built a music that can be said to contain the roots of rock but moved away from it by adopting postures closer to the fragile than the virile. Basically, despite his legendary temperament, Murat appeared as in himself in his most fragile pieces, the closest to nature too. Someone who wrote a piece called Young Rain On the Thistle and another called Red is My Sleep can only be missed.