abc. Récital 1963

This album, produced in a very small number of copies (probably around fifteen), was distributed to friends of the singer and the photographer. Each copy is numbered and signed; nos. 2, 5, 11 and 12 are known to us. The official program of the ABC theater, Léo Ferré – Récital 1963, includes a number of photographs taken at the small fort at Saint-Coulomb, but none from this exceptional series appear in it. No other publication of this small, confidential photo-reportage exists.

A celebrated music hall located at 11 boulevard Poissonnière in the second arrondissement of Paris, the ABC opened in 1935 on the site of the former Théâtre Plaza, which Mitty Goldin converted into a music hall and shrewdly renamed so as to head the alphabetical list of Parisian programs.

In 1962, Léo Ferré became the first singer-songwriter to be published in Pierre Seghers’s “Poètes d’aujourd’hui” series. He spent the whole summer preparing this recital, planned well in advance for the winter of 1962, and performed it from December to January 1963, shortly before the venue closed in 1964 to be converted into a cinema, which opened in May 1965 and remained in operation until December 1981.

Following these concerts, an LP, Alhambra-ABC, was released in 1963 and quickly withdrawn from sale: the song “Mon Général” unsurprisingly displeased the authorities, and the record was censored. It contained eight tracks (“Chanson mécanisée,” “Le vent,” “T’as payé,” “Les Temps difficiles,” “Mon Général,” “Stances,” “Nous les filles” and “Regardez-les”), only four of which (tracks 3, 4, 5 and 6) had been recorded live.

Trained as a filmmaker, Jean-Pierre Sudre developed a body of art photography that stood apart from the trends of his time and possessed a rare poetic quality. On first meeting Léo Ferré, he took a series of photographs of the singer at his property in Saint-Coulomb, in Ille-et-Vilaine; these images were used for the artwork of the album La Langue française, released in the fall of 1962. That year was also the year of Sudre’s first Paris exhibition, with a catalogue preface by Brassaï. In the autumn, Ferré called on him again to cover the rehearsals at the ABC, from which Sudre produced this series of candid photographs taken during rehearsals.

Original black-and-white silver gelatin prints.