Ma Fleur — The Cinematic Orchestra (2007)
The soundtrack to a film that never existed, and the one it made up as it went.
By Rafi Mercer
Most music arrives already knowing what it's for.
A dance record knows the floor it's heading to. A love song knows who it's addressed to. A film score knows its picture, every cue measured against a cut someone else has already made. Even the quietest records usually have a room in mind.
Then there are the ones that start without knowing. Music made first, with the reason found afterwards.
Ma Fleur is one of those.
By 2007 Jason Swinscoe had spent eight years building the Cinematic Orchestra around an idea in its name. Motion, in 1999, took jazz players into a London studio and then took the recordings apart, rebuilding them into something that moved like film. Every Day followed in 2002. In 2003 came a real film, a new score for Dziga Vertov's silent Man with a Movie Camera. The band had done the thing properly, with music written to a picture that already existed.
The next record wouldn't come. Swinscoe had the music but not the shape. So he did something unusual and generous with his own uncertainty. He handed a rough version to a friend, who went away and came back a few weeks later with a script: short scenes, each one a different moment in a life. Swinscoe took the story into the studio and reworked the music around it. The film was written to the soundtrack. Then the soundtrack was rewritten to the film. Then the film was never made.
What's left is the score to an imagined life. You hear the casting before you hear anything else.
Three voices carry it, and they were chosen like actors. Patrick Watson, then a little-known singer from Montreal, is the young man at the start, all piano and open vowels. Fontella Bass, who had sung "Rescue Me" for Chess Records in 1965 and then spent decades in jazz, gospel and near-silence, is the elder, the one who has been through it. Lou Rhodes, from Lamb, is somewhere between them, and she's given the ending. Swinscoe said at the time that the new priority was storytelling, lyricism and the song. You can hear him casting the parts.
The record moves the way a film edits. It doesn't follow the order of an album.
"To Build a Home" opens it, and almost everyone knows that song now. Piano, Watson's voice, and strings arranged by Stella Page that barely move. They hold a chord, lean in, and step back. "Familiar Ground" brings Bass in straight after, and the age of her voice changes the temperature at once. Then the record does something brave. It goes quiet. "Child Song", "Prelude" and "As the Stars Fall" are less like tracks than the spaces between scenes. A long shot of a street. A window. Someone walking home. The title track, written by saxophonist Tom Chant, puts bass clarinet over Phil France's double bass and Nick Ramm's piano. It's the most jazz-like moment on the record, and it sits right at the heart of it, as if the band were remembering where they came from.
Then "Breathe", with Bass again, co-written with the singer Lhasa. It's the emotional centre, sung by the voice with the most history in it.
Then the turn.
Near the end, the record goes back to its first song. "That Home" is not even two minutes long, Watson again, the opening idea returned to and stripped down. It's the scene late in a film where you see the house from the beginning, and everything that happened in between is in the way you look at it. Then Lou Rhodes closes the album with "Time and Space", nearly nine minutes long, letting the last scene play out without a cut.
Home. Then away. Then home again, changed.
That's the whole film, and it never needed a camera.
This is why Ma Fleur belongs in a listening room. It barely survives the way most people meet it now, as one song pulled out on its own. "To Build a Home" has been used so often in film and television that it has a second life as shorthand for grief. Heard alone, it's a beautiful, sad song. Heard where Swinscoe put it, at the start of something, it becomes a promise, and the next fifty minutes keep it. The record asks you to stay. It asks for the lights low and a side at a time, and for the attention you'd give a film you couldn't pause.
Critics were split in 2007. Some missed the jazz of Motion and Every Day. Some found the script idea too much. PopMatters gave it nine out of ten and called it one of the best albums the reviewer had heard in years. Pitchfork was cooler. All About Jazz may have come closest, calling it a soundtrack without a movie, a daydream without a dreamer. The band took it on the road, and their concert at the Royal Albert Hall came out as a live album the following year.
The real afterlife was quieter, and it was mostly the one song. Long after the reviews were forgotten, "To Build a Home" kept turning up at weddings and funerals, in hospital dramas and late-night playlists. People found the album the long way round, one song first and then the rest.
The title means "my flower". It's tender and old-fashioned, the kind of thing you'd say to one person, not to a crowd. The whole record works in that register.
There is no film. There was never going to be. Swinscoe made the music first and went looking for the life it belonged to. Most of us do it the other way round. We live through things, and only later find the record that seems to have been waiting for them.
Ma Fleur suggests you might start with the music.
What is Ma Fleur by the Cinematic Orchestra?
Ma Fleur is the Cinematic Orchestra's 2007 album, released on Ninja Tune and produced by Jason Swinscoe. It was written as the soundtrack to a specially commissioned screenplay for a film that was never made. Patrick Watson, Fontella Bass and Lou Rhodes sing on it.
Who sings "To Build a Home"?
Patrick Watson, the Canadian singer-songwriter from Montreal, who also plays piano on it. It opens Ma Fleur, and has since been used widely in film and television.
Is Ma Fleur good for a listening bar?
Yes, if it's played in full. The album is built like a film, with songs as scenes and instrumentals as the spaces between them, and it rewards a full side heard on a good system at low light. Played as a single track, it loses most of what makes it special.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
