Red Cloud

"We had conquered America. It had taken us a long time, but in the end, it was done. The buffalo were dead. The great wild country had become a great civilized country, and I, Jim Turrache, was taking part in the new adventure of the century: that of skyscrapers".
Nuage Rouge was the first musical tale chosen to be performed as part of Nantes' "Folles Journée" (February 2018).
A magical tale of friendship and racism, a tribute to jazz and American music, set against the backdrop of skyscraper construction in America in the 20s and 30sCreated in 2017, Orchestre Victor Hugo/Scène Nationale de Besançon.

An actor
29-piece live orchestra (plus original Indian flute): 2**011/ sax /0230 3perc strings (mini 44332)
Projected or live drawings (optional)
Duration 45/50 min
Available for hire from Editions Billaudot

A few words from the composer

"Jazz accompanied the construction of America... unless it's the other way around... Jazz, but not only: gospel, blues, New Orleans, negro spirituals, Dixieland, lindy hop, then swing... Musics of mixing, spaces of freedom. Then jazz grew, like New York and the Great Plains further west. It was used as a flag, as official music, to boost morale and take the place of traditional music. Uncle Sam wanted to reclaim and unify the great country; music was a weapon, and the Indians were on the reservations with their faraway songs. Then Mac Couick burgers arrived, this time to unify the world... Jazz escaped, not made for it... other obligatory music took its place on TVs and in shopping malls, the spirit of jazz returned to the plains, to small clubs, it found its roots and once again became music of hope, imagination, resistance, unreality, freedom.

Nuage Rouge's cinematic, jazz-infused music pays tribute to this freedom, and to Louis Armstrong's huge smile when he sang "What a wonderful world"...

Jean-François Verdier

A few words from the author

"When I was a teenager, I was fascinated, like a lot of teenagers, by American Indians. They were beautiful, free, and you didn't have to step on their toes too much, or even at all. They were history's losers, but what losers! It's funny, I thought to myself, they lost the wars against the new Americans, the whites, but they won the war of the minds, they became a myth, a symbol of freedom... for today's imagination, an Indian is obviously not an alcoholic stuck on a rotten reservation, but a fierce warrior, riding across the plains... that's what Nuage Rouge tells us: the moment in American history when the Indians had to leave this world that was no longer made for them, and the moment when they entered the mythology, the collective mind.

The character of Jim, a black laborer, is not innocent either: it's as if the descendants of slaves were making the transition between the America of the Indians, the one before the conquest, and the America of the whites, the one after the conquest. Where the Indians were unable to find their place in the new world, the blacks made it for themselves, through pain and struggle, to the point of electing a president from their ranks. And this struggle was waged through music, from jazz to rap, gospel, rhythm'n blues, funk and disco.

Vincent Cuvelier