Concert A Prades Le Lez returns to the nights in January 1974 when the Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra first gave François Tusques’ political and musical imagination a concrete, collective form. Recorded at the Moulin de Prades‑le‑Lez, a few kilometres from Montpellier, the two volumes document the birth of a band that, in the spirit of Don Cherry and Chris McGregor, set out to dissolve the borders between styles, geographies and social worlds. With Tusques at the piano, Michel Marre and Jo Maka on saxophones, Adolf Winkler on trombone and Guem on percussion, the group approach jazz as a meeting point rather than a genre – a place where village dances, street marches, blues shouts and minimalist figures can all pass through the same small room.

The first volume moves like an atlas in motion. Pieces slip from New Orleans‑inflected brass jubilations into Breton‑tinged melodies, then tilt toward North African rhythmic patterns without ever sounding forced. Tusques’ stride and blues vocabulary is constantly tugged sideways by African winds from the horns and Guem’s drumming, turning familiar progressions into something rougher and more communal. You can hear the audience being pulled in almost immediately: clapping, cheering, answering phrases. This is “free dance music” in a literal sense – free in its refusal of hierarchy between traditions, dance music in its commitment to shared movement.

The second volume pushes that framework further out. Here the Intercommunal build unprecedented soundscapes around the most modest kernels: a song of revolt, a dance tune, a single burst of dissonance. A simple chorus might open a piece before being stretched, fractured and reassembled into something that feels ritualistic and slightly otherworldly; a groove might start on earthy, stomping ground then gradually thin out into overlapping ostinatos and horn calls that seem to hover in mid‑air. On repeat listens, the set acquires a strangely lunar quality: the same materials keep returning under different light, familiar motifs rendered uncanny by the band’s relish for recombination.

Underlying the exuberance is a clear, explicitly stated politics. When Tusques founded the Intercommunal in 1971, after leaving an indelible mark on French jazz with albums like Free Jazz, Le Nouveau Jazz and Piano Dazibao, he framed the orchestra as a tool for fraternisation between communities. “Our music will help, we hope, to resolve the contradictions that exist between workers belonging to different communities, by breaking down various forms of national chauvinism,” he wrote, targeting in particular French condescension towards so‑called Third World cultures. Leaflets from the group insist that song form itself must become “a weapon in the struggle against capitalist exploitation and all those who oppress us morally and materially,” echoing Jean‑Baptiste Clément’s legacy. On Concert A Prades Le Lez, that manifesto is audible in the way the band treats every borrowed melody, rhythm or mode as common property, a means of building a shared, temporary republic in sound.

At the same time, the Intercommunal never confuse seriousness with solemnity. “We’re not among the Colonels,” they joke at the outset, before launching into a stride tune that no one in the crowd can resist for long. Across both volumes, the energy is striking and unbroken: jazz, blues, traditional airs, minimal cells, funk‑ish vamps and free improvisation are all thrown into the same pot, stirred with evident delight. The musicians’ wide listening becomes a resource for reinvention rather than a catalogue to be cited. Each piece sends out a call for love and fraternity that is as much physical as ideological – you feel it in the sway of the room, the shout of a horn line, the way a rhythm section locks into a cycle that seems, briefly, to carry everyone with it.

Half a century on, the restored reissue of Concert A Prades Le Lez feels like both historical document and urgent present tense. Among the many recordings made by the Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra, these two volumes come first, in every sense: they are the initial, electrifying proofs of a musical vision of borderless brotherhood that later albums – L’Inter Communal, Vol. 4, Le Musichien, Après la marée noire – would continue to elaborate. In an era once again marked by hardened borders and resurgent chauvinisms, hearing these 1974 performances is to be reminded that another kind of gathering is possible: a small room in Occitanie, a handful of instruments, and a band determined to mix everything they love into one unruly, welcoming current.