#94 Gaspar Claus and Pedro Soler

Let’s start with the desert, with a cello in the desert, before we go back to Banyuls.

Banyuls. Pedro Soler. Gaspar Claus. This Take away show is the confluence where some other Take away shows flow. Banyuls is the city where the The National’s has been shot. Pedro Soler plays guitar in a Cincinatti amphiteater during Music Now festival. Gaspar Claus accompanied Vincent Moon when he filmed Sidi Touré in Mali.

Somehow, there are other connexions. Gaspar Claus is an old friend of Vincent’s. Banyuls is part of their history. Above all, Peter Soler is Gaspar’s father. Moon had been talking about this project for ages, shooting a Take away show with Gaspar and his cello. I was torn between curiosity and confidence on one hand, and scepticism on the other hand.

Scepticism vanished, just like dust on a guitar’s strings, swept away by the fugitive gesture of old nimble fingers. because there’s music, another kind of music, because there’s a story, because there’s family.

Watch this first video and observe how, when you film a different kind of music, everything looks brand new. Gestures which look unseen, arms stretching on both sides of the cello, supported by the shoulder, a hand which hardly moves and fingers twirling around.

Listen to the stories of an old Flamenco guitar player, Franco, Walter Benjamin, Toulouse, borders, exiles, abandoned hotels, deserted seashores, obsolete customs.

But above all, it’s in the end, in the very end of the last video, that everything is told. Thanks to just a tiny little something, of course. There’s a boy, at the front, focused on his cello. There’s his father behind him, playing too, with more lightness, probably due to his experience. His guitar accompanies him on its own, his hands make their own way, he can accompany the cello while being focused on one thing : watching his son playing it and be alert, admiring, tender. If one day, in the future, life gives me the opportunity to stare at my son this way, I’ll think to myself it would have been worth living it.