** 2026 Stock ** Nègre blanc began as a simple commission and became something far stranger. When Rectangle asked Jean-Louis Costes for “a record about jazz,” they were leaning into his oft‑forgotten early ambition: before the trash‑operas, before the noise cassettes, Costes briefly tried to become a free‑jazz musician, even enrolling at Alan Silva’s IACP in Paris. He left quickly, repelled by what he experienced as a closed, self‑serious milieu, and his frustration with those circles never really dissipated. Decades later, given the chance to confront jazz on his own terms, he chose not to polish his chops but to dissect the idiom from the outside - with scissors, sampler and bile.
The record’s raw material comes from a solo session by saxophonist Quentin Rollet at Costes’ home. Rollet, a key figure around Rectangle and a committed free improviser, recorded unaccompanied saxophone passages expressly to be used as source. Costes then chopped, looped and re‑contextualised these improvisations, treating them less as “jazz solos” than as noisy, breathing texture: shrieks become rhythmic punctuation, multiphonics turn into ominous drones, snatches of lyricism are cut off mid‑phrase and made to stutter under his voice. Over and through this deconstructed horn landscape, Costes layers his trademark vocals - shouted, whispered, muttered, spat - along with cheap electronics and rudimentary beats. The result is not jazz in any orthodox sense; it’s a kind of hostile homage, a record that uses jazz’s sounds as fuel for Costes’ own theatre of cruelty.
As ever with Costes, the themes are confrontational and deliberately uncomfortable. The title Nègre blanc points straight at France’s unresolved histories of race, class and colonialism, and the lyrics - delivered in his mix of chanson, rant and grotesque monologue - dive into that minefield head‑on. Costes has long been described as a “French GG Allin,” but where Allin’s medium was bodily shock, Costes has always been more interested in linguistic and symbolic taboo. Here, he uses the charged vocabulary of “black” and “white” not to produce easy inversions but to expose hypocrisies, self‑loathing and fantasies at the heart of French identity. The reworked saxophone, constantly yelping and gasping under his voice, functions almost as a second character - a stand‑in for the idea of jazz itself, alternately mocked, brutalised, caricatured and, in flashes, weirdly honoured.
Within Costes’ sprawling discography - dozens of self‑released tapes, CDrs and CDs since the early 1980s - Nègre blanc occupies a particular niche. Released in 1997 on Rectangle and later reissued on CD, it sits between more purely electronic “song” albums and his longform trash‑opera performances. Musically, it is one of his most tightly framed projects, constrained by the commission’s brief and by the decision to work from Rollet’s sax alone. That constraint sharpens his collage instincts: tracks tend to be short and sharply edited, with sudden drop‑outs, brutal cuts and looping that sometimes parodies, sometimes channels the repetitive logic of both free improvisation and hip‑hop sampling. The overall texture is grittier than the synth‑driven records he is often known for, closer to a mutant radio play than to a conventional noise album.
