Iggy Pop Records Jazz Album

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Iggy Pop Records Jazz Album

03/02/09 5:05pm

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

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Iggy Pop will release a jazz album based on a novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq this spring.

Preliminaires will be based on Houellebecq's La Possibilite D'Une Ile (The Possibility Of An Island). Pop (real name James Osterberg) says it's out in April, but a video that you can see below lists a release date of May 18.

Pop says Preliminaires is a "quieter album with some jazz overtones" he made because he was sick of guitar-based music.

"At one point, I just got sick of listening to idiot thugs with guitars banging out crappy music," Pop says in the video posted on his website. "I was starting to listen to a lot of New Orleans-era Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton type of jazz, and I've always loved quieter ballads."

Pop sings one of Preliminaires' songs, "Les Feuilles Mortes" ("Dead Leaves" in English) in French. He says another song (that's featured in the video below), "King Of The Dogs," is about "just how cool it is to be a dog and how much it beats human life."

The project's genesis came about last year when Pop was invited to write the music for Last Words, a documentary about Houellebecq's efforts to make a film version of La Possibilite D'Une Ile.

"As I looked at footage of Michel and re-read the book, which I did with intense pleasure when it came out, in my mind, I created music that would have been the music that I would hear in my soul when I read this book," Pop says.

The novel is about a cloning cult that's very much like the Raelian sect, which believes in extending human life through cloning. Pop says the book's about "death, sex, the end of the human race and some other pretty funny stuff." Maybe Preliminaires isn't so strange, then.

Here's Pop talking about the album (click the play button twice to make it work properly):

Tags: Iggy Pop

Sat, 03/14/2009 - 4:20pm — luakapop

luakapop
Sat, 03/14/2009 - 4:20pm

Hal Cragin co-wrote and Produced Preliminaires.you can read more about the tracks on Hals myspace page..pretty funny stuff. Hal Cragin played bass with Iggy in the past as well.from His site :

New York: Fans of the music of punk godfather Iggy Pop might be surprised to hear the quite rocking singer/songwriter has a softer side. In 1998 his longtime touring and recording bass player Hal Cragin suggested a jazz collaboration to Iggy as a relaxing departure from their relentless—and high-volume—touring schedule. "Our first collaboration was in my apartment/studio on 3rd St., something very informal just duo things, which I added to later,” Cragin recalls. “We did some Jobim and Cole Porter, it was a lot of fun, and Iggy was really on." These tracks were put aside for more than a decade while Iggy and Hal went on to other musical creations, until "Iggy got a call to do music for a documentary about a writer named Michel Houellbecq trying to direct a movie version of his popular book, The Possibility of an Island,” says Cragin. “At that very same time, I had sent Iggy our old jazz tracks just for posterity's sake. The timing was right, and we used this excuse to resurrect and complete our particular collaboration."