Looking back, there’s something very telling in the first video clip I embedded here which you can watch below. In it we see one Jay Alanski participating in Thierry Ardisson’s popular “Le Blind Test” – a show where celebrities and/or musicians are presented with excerpts from records, quizzed whether they can guess what’s playing. What’s fascinating, at least to me, is just how Jay is intimately focused on listening to each snippet, as if understanding that these aren’t “foreign” acts but his peers and stuff of his league. As one by one, he guesses Duran Duran, Neneh Cherry, Womack & Womack, he lingers on the music of Kajagoogoo, Tanita Tikaram, and Belgium’s Soulsister. You can see the gears turning, trying to tap into memories or ideas he just can’t quite announce as swiftly.
There, lost in the music, Jay takes precious seconds to stretch a public listening session, for all those who hadn’t heard those fascinating bits of musical ephemera. You see, it was his, The Price Of Love, released earlier that year, presenting a myriad of such moments. On video, he was captured in feeling, catching himself attaining a certain level. Immersed in thought, we can capture how he had caught a glimpse of his own masterpiece within the larger soul music zeitgeist.
Born Jay Alansky, it was his musical life that began in the place he was born, in 1955. It was as a Parisian teenager in the ‘60s that the music of Gene Vincent spurred an early love of rock’n’roll and shortly, the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dylan, and others, would propel Jay to pick up his first guitar, strum a few chords, and convince his father to publish his first record in 1971. His first fans would be other classmates at Voltaire High School, one of which (Christophe J.) would help Jay create his first band, The Beautiful Losers.
It was in that mid and latter day 70’s period that Jay would establish some kind of rapport within the French music establishment. Although his solo and band-related work wouldn’t quite take off, other musician’s realized the talent of this young singer-songwriter. A Belgian music writer, Jacques Duvall, proposed a collaboration, to work as a team writing songs for upstart pop artists.
In 1977, Duvall would discover a young teenager, one Lio, of whom they’d go on to write countless pop songs, each one aspiring to be a “hit”. Jay’s first classic would come in the form of Lio’s “Le Banana Split”. It was that spirited electro-pop earworm that predicted the following decade, to the tune of a multi-million copy selling European hit. In the span of a year he’d parlay such notoriety by contributing lyrics to Alain Chamfort’s Poses, The Hollywood Bananas, and Plastic Bertrand’s equally New Wave-y singles. By 1979, naturally, Jay must have come to the conclusion: “So, what’s up with my own solo career?”
Just 25 years old, Jay was full of piss and vinegar, trying to leverage whatever he could from signing with Vogue Records to create an album full of original music more along the stylings of music he wanted to make. Maybe taking cues from the late, great Marvin Gaye and/or Stevie Wonder, Jay absconded with his label’s money to Los Angeles and recorded in 1979 Tendre Est La Nuit entirely by himself.
Wonderfully out of step with French pop of the day, Jay Alanski’s Tendre Est La Nuit showed his true love really lay in the soul music of America. Taking cues from Philly funk and New York City disco, his debut featured songs like “Les Malheurs De Sophie” which were more indebted to the works of tastemakers from those scenes, while others like “Amoureux D’Elle” and “Géraldine (Tendre Est La Nuit)” became dancefloor-centric funk burners that inspired more comparisons to American soul artists like Michael Jackson and Rick James. Who knew that the kid who fashioned himself a rock’n’roll dandy had this in him?
Therein lies the rub. Apparently, his record label didn’t quite know what to do with him. Although highly successful as a writer behind the scenes, at the forefront was this young, white, Parisian man who wrote urban songs of a different stripe. He was simply too much “else” for his record company to promote. Where do you play his music? At the disco? On the radio? Was he “French” enough? Once again, despite penning great songs for others in the burgeoning French New Wave scene, a sophomore album, La Force Qu’on A En Nous would be rejected and Jay would have to find another way to get his own ideas out there.
By the mid ‘80s, a series of failed solo singles had left Jay’s solo career in the rear view mirror. It would be Jay’s writing and production work that would keep the light burning (and his own music career from completely stalling). A welcome change of pace would arrive in 1987 while working a session for French rockers, Les Innocents. On some recording sessions for their “Jodie”, Jay would meet and befriend burgeoning actress, Jil Caplan.
It would be Jil Caplan who would rekindle Jay’s keen songwriting instincts. She wanted to be a singer but not in a traditional way. With Jil, Jay was given the freedom to experiment with the French chanson. Given the reins as producer, arranger, and songwriter, Jay could explore that soul music he had to leave behind, in a modern form that worked to Jil’s aspirations. Now iconic new French soul standards like “Comme Sur Une Balançoire” and “Oh! Tous Les Soirs”, to go along with future hit singles like “Natalie Wood” and “Parle-Moi (Entre Les Tombes)” would cement just how special the stylistic change (or changes) Jay was willing to undergo in his vision of contemporary French soul music.
Not just working on the music but also exploring visual work, acting as a director, photographer, and painter for her and others, Jay was finally getting to that point he always aspired to. In an age where male musicians tended to ghostwrite terribly for other female artists, here Jay had the ability and trajectory with others like Marie Léonor and Anna Betti, to point to why his work facilitated their visions differently.
However, it would be in 1988, where few would realize what Jay was quietly chipping away, working away at. Gathering all sorts of demos that went nowhere, half-finished songs that no one wanted before, and genuine gems that he had to keep hidden until the right moment presented itself, finally did. Jay had been working almost entirely by himself at Paris’s Studio Garage on his monumental work, a double LP he’d dub The Price Of Love.
Befitting all those stone-cold critically-acclaimed double LP’s that honor the sheer amount of blood, sweat, and wax laid on them – think of Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key Of Life, Prince’s Sign O’ The Times, Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, and The Beatles’ White Album – so too did Jay turn in his most prolific and truly inspired music yet. Sung entirely in English, Jay was brazen enough to think that these songs were just as good as any of that music, that this music, his music could be as transportive to merit the album’s nearly two-hour long run time. Now hearing it play back, I think he couldn’t have been closer to the truth. This is an album, once listened to, I feel remains a part of you forever (in ways such totemic works are meant to live). Focused on one emotion, LOVE, Jay finds universal songs that span the gamut of many visions belonging to one man.
Rather than stick to an overarching vibe, you could say, The Price Of Love is divided into moods. The album begins with a sector I could best describe as “mutant soul”. Songs like “That’s How The World Is Turning Now”, “The Price Of Love”, “My Guardian Angel”, and “The Last Goodbye” on the A-side sound indebted to such sterling production cues from the likes of Thomas Leer, Alexander O’Neal, all the way to Prince himself. Then you flip that first side over and hear songs like “Memories For Sale”, “Chain-smokin’/Chowpatty”, and the stunning “Where I’ll Be With You”, that owe as much debt to the sophisticated elder pop of Burt Bacharach, Ray Davies, and Scott Walker.
No matter the song, no matter the minute, what you notice as you play every bit of this album, is just how personal the subject matter is. Songs of love and heartbreak, transmute to songs of lust, longing, and nostalgia. When the C-side begins with a country-tinged ballad, signaling another facet, this time of a lovelorn balladeer, songs like “Distress”, “Dandy For You”, and “Leaving You For Good” hint that the near decade-long absence of his solo work never meant that Jay wasn’t in tune with where music was going. Every track skip allows the listener to experience another surprising stylistic vignette that only Jay could pull off. Jay had all these ideas bottled up and now had the canvas to splatter that painting.
It’s the “Big Music” of the final D-side. Tracks like “Eyes” that could have, would have, been perfectly placed in a blockbuster teen romance. Tracks like “This May Be… (The Story of My Life)” that seemed tailor-made to speak to any tuning into proper “quiet storm” radio. This was sprawling, hot, lovers music only bounded by the theoretical length of a 33 RPM record. Songs like “Change” now over an hour deep into the vision, feel relentless – here’s another hit that should have been. “My World” – bam, there’s another. Dance music that touches the heart, mind and booty, The Price Of Love is the answer to its own question.
Surrendering his music to the grooves in this music, Jay’s album remains as startling to this day in its audacious magnitude of quality, quantity, and spirit. Here was literally everything he wanted to say, everything he had been holding back for long, and here it was, finally, committed to al eternity. And who’s to say it’s not you who can’t fall in love again with Jay’s eternal desire?