INTERVIEW : GENTLEMAN
Interview by : Sébastien Jobart
Pictures by : DR
le Friday, November 28th 2014 - 8 130 vues
Premier artiste reggae à se produire à l’émission MTV Unplugged, Gentleman n’a pas laissé passer sa chance. Contacté cet été, enregistré dans la foulée, l’album de superbe confection est déjà disponible - en attendant la sortie du DVD le 5 décembre. Gentleman revient avec nous sur cette opportunité unique.
Reggaefrance / How this project was born?
Gentleman / To me, MTV Unplugged is something special. I personally am a fan of the series. One of my favorite album is "Lauryn Hill Unplugged". There are so many great artists who did it and put the music in a whole different way, it’s just a beautiful way to rediscover your own songs. I was a fan of the series and then I was a guest for German hip hop singer Max Herre. I had a song with him called Tabula Rasa. I was there, I could get a taste and I was really impressed by the production, the rearranging… MTV told me that they can imagine do it with me too, but I didn’t know it would happen so fast. One day, I had this phone call from MTV saying they were eager to do the show with me. The timeframe was really short, it was almost impossible to deliver.
I called Dean Fraser which was to me one of the most important things of the whole project. Having Dean Fraser on the board is a sure shot for wonderful arrangements and wonderful ideas. The challenge is to do songs in a different way. It’s a sort of best of album too; it’s my first best of album I don’t like the word “best of” because the best is supposed to come yet. It’s the first compilation from Gentleman after six albums. I thought it was a wonderful way to combine it, to be unplugged and my first best of album. Everything worked together.
The result is outstanding.
I think so too. I was very overwhelmed by the guests. There were a lot of featured artists already in Europe. I called Shaggy, I called Ky-mani Marley and it was cool they could be part of the project. I also wanted to do some things from other genres, so I invited Campino, a great rock artist from Germany, and Marlon Roudette from England. It’s very universal to me.
You are the first reggae artist to be featured in this famous show. How does it feel?
On one hand, it feels very good, because I hope this thing put reggae music itself in a different light again, on a different level. It’s not about me, it’s about the whole genre of reggae music. MTV Unplugged is a very renowned project. If they are willing to do this with a reggae artist, it’s a very good thing for reggae.
On the other hand, I was kind of shocked to realize I was the first reggae artist ever doing this. It was kind of surprising because so many artists who deserve more than me doing MTV Unplugged. Nobody has been asked. Well I don’t know: maybe somebody has been asked and it didn’t work out. Jimmy Cliff, Luciano, Damian Marley… There are so many artists that I would love to hear on MTV Unplugged. But we shouldn’t overrate in that way: it’s still a wonderful concert, a renowned project, but it’s just a concert, a wonderful concert.
 Il y a un langage universel qui relie les gens, quel que soit leur passé, leur religion, leur éducation. C’est pour moi le pouvoir de la musique. 
Songs are truly transformed, with great arrangements for horns and strings. It is an amazing work.
There are a lot of songs, with dancehall, electronic, digital production, so the challenge was to substitute synthetized sounds with natural, organic sounds. That the whole thing about unplugged. “Unplugged” means that there is no effect board between the guitar for example and the amplifier. Everything is natural, there are no synthesized sounds. There is no electronic bass; we worked with a double bass. Instead of synthetized sounds we had strings; instead of organ we have a Fender Rhodes piano… Sometimes the challenge was to put a whole different characteristic into the song. For example, Heart of Rub A Dub is an electronic riddim. Dean Fraser came up with this idea to make a deeply roots thing out of it. Or like You Remember, we worked with it on the grand piano and put some strings… Songs like Superior or Dem Gone are close to the original, because the original songs are already acoustic, except for the electronic bass.
There are exclusive songs with Shaggy and Ky-mani Marley. Did you write those songs especially for the show ?
Yes. My friend Ben (the producer Ben Bazzazian, editor’s note) came with the riddim for the song with Shaggy. I love it because it reminds me of this old school vibe, but still up to the time. It gave me this kind of Oh Carolina vibe that Shaggy did back in the days. So I had Shaggy in my mind already. Everytime I saw Shaggy, we were like : “It’s time for us to make a song together”. I thought this MTV Unplugged was a wonderful way to do this song finally. He loved the riddim, and boom that was it! The same with Ky-mani Marley: he asked me to do a song for his album, and I always wanted to work with him for my project. It was also Ben who came up with this instrumental, and we worked on it together.
There are two covers: Big City Life and Redemption Song. If I’m not wrong this is the first cover you sing…
There is actually a rule from MTV to have at least one cover song on the album. That was a problem because as you said, I never did a cover song in my life yet! Somebody told me: “You always do Redemption Song a capella when you finish your show”. To me, it is one of the most beautiful song somebody ever wrote. It’s very conforting, rebellious, universal… This is a song that I sing a capella together with the audience while the musicians are leaving the stage, something I always did. It was for me a great tribute to Robert Nesta Marley with his son Ky-Mani and Campino, a rock star from Germany and a good friend of mine. Dean Fraser came up with the arrangements and I think it is really beautiful.
About Big City Life, I met Marlon Roudette a couple times on festivals and I really liked that song back in the days. I was a fan of his music and I respect him as a hUman being. He was in Germany doing promotion. He has the same record company, it happened very naturally.
How did you choose the very few patrons who had the chance to see you perform?
It was very difficult because I wanted an intimate space. Actually I wanted to have like a rehearsal room. My vision was this video from Metallica, Nothing Else Matters, where musicians come together in a very intimate atmosphere, almost like a living room, and just jamming. So there was no space for a lot of people. What I did, I asked people about their connection to my music. I got a lot of letters from fans, and it was very breathe-taking, inspiring, to see what the music does. I read all the letters and I picked –that was really hard- 35 people. There was one guy who said that until he was 16, his life was full of violence in the family, alcoholism, drugs and stuff. He spent 9 hours a day at the computer, with no perspective. Then he heard the song Empress with the horn line; he wanted to know what instrument that was, found out it was a saxophone, and started learning to play. Now, he plays in a band, touring the world… All of this because of one horn line!
Another guy wrote he was at one of my concert, he met a girl and they felt in love at first sight, but then he couldn’t find her, he tried everything but in vain. Seven years later, he met her again at one of my concert, and now they are married and have two kids. It so beautiful to see what music can do to people.
You pleased your fans from the outset with several songs from your two first albums. How do you consider those songs in retrospect?
To me every song reflects a certain episode of life. All the songs I choose for the album are timeless to me. Songs like Dem Gone, Intoxication, Different Places, are songs that I still play live because people request these songs. There is a connection. There is a universal language that connects anyone regardless of their background, religion, or their education. This is to me the power of the music. Music is comforting, music is the soundtrack of every revolution, music is the way to manifest our thoughts and feelings. This is actually what it is about. It was very difficult to pick from six albums plus singles… I didn’t want to do an album with 50 songs, I didn’t want to overdo it. We rehearsed 35-40 songs, and we picked the best ones.
Will you go on tour with a small acoustic set?
Not with a small set! We plan to do the same thing. Probably with 4 strings, because the stages are not so big, but we want to stay as close as possible to the recording. Dean Fraser will be there, some guests will be there… It’s going to be in April. We will play some shows in April and then we’ll see how it is going to turn out. It’s difficult to tour with so many people, we have to find out if it works, and we’ll see if we can take it from there to another level.
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