In order to celebrate the centenary of Boris Vian’s birth, Arnaud Marzorati gives an account of this rooted genius, nurtured by all those free, insolent voices that seek to annoy the middle classes, the conventions and straight-liners. With this album he reminds us of the relationship between the furious inventors of the late 19th century and this inquisitive artiste, intoxicated with freedom, mad keen on jazz, whom it would take a long time to be considered one of the most inventive of the 20th century. Vian is the art of the absurd, a regenerating libertarian, a schoolboy man of letters with an agile laugh who writes simple stories to enrage serious people.

Boris Vian had a brief career as a singer. To be true, he left behind him more than 450 chanson texts, some of which are permanently in the memory, yet at his death at the age of 39 in 1959, he had known enough failure for the legend to be constructed of a genius emerging too early, for the chanson to be thought of as literature and a certain political outlook on the world. His posthumous destiny has made him a forerunner of the rebel values of the 1960s, of post May 1968 hedonism or of the individualism of the 1980s...

For this homage disc, Arnaud Marzorati and Les Lunaisiens have chosen to feature the fetish instrument of Vian’s 20 years: the trumpet. About this, the double bass, accordion, bandoneon and ukulele rejoice and revisit some at times forgotten standards. Agathe Peyrat is the female voice, warm and lyrical; the other, masculine and male, is that of Arnaud Marzorati.

The Vian of the Lunaisiens is part of this history of the ‘French chanson’, a unique heritage of the French. After Jacques Prévert, Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Gustave Nadaud, the chansonniers of the French Revolution, the political writers of the 19th century or Georges Brassens, The Highway Code is an adventure that goes beyond its argument in order to pursue the portrait of a people.

Les Lunaisiens:
- Arnaud Marzorati (baritone, direction)
- Agathe Peyrat (soprano, ukulele)
- Fabien Norbert (trumpet)
- Pierre Cussac (accordion, bandoneon)
- Raphaël Schwab (double bass)