Various Artists - Mobilisation Generale - French Protest and Spirit Jazz 1970-1976

Reissue of a twelve-track compilation of rare French spiritual jazz from the early-to-mid 1970s, compiled by JB (Born Bad Records) and Julien Achard (Diggers Digest), it was originally released in 2013.

Simultaneously spatial, pastoral and tribal, the tracks in this collection represent an ideal intersection between a sort of psychedelic legacy, the space jazz of Sun Ra and Afro Beat (then being created by Fela in Lagos): they are as much incantations (often driven by the spoken word), war cries or poems as they are polemics.

For 20 year olds in the early 1970s, making music was a political act; they grabbed a microphone to advance a cause, not to become rock stars. While the price of oil skyrocketed and Pompidou went overboard building horrible concrete apartment buildings for public housing and adapting the city for the automobile, some took refuge in the countryside. Alternative communities formed all across France, giving rise to groups (or rather, collectives) with open-minded structures, cheerfully mixing music, theatrical happenings and agitprop, along with a good dose of acid.