Later expeditions to Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Madagascar followed. This was real modern music! This was my real discovery of the world’s contemporary music, and not only that of the Western world.” SORAFOM was later renamed Office De Coopération Radiophonique, aka Ocora, and Duvelle would later take on running its record label, specialising in recordings of traditional music.ĭuvelle had previously recorded classical and jazz, but in the early 1960s he worked outside Europe for the time, with a recording trip to Niger.
“Very badly recorded, but to me completely new and full of originality. "I discovered a lot of tapes Music, too,” Duvelle said of his early years at SORAFOM in a recent interview for Sublime Frequencies. In 1959 he began work at Pierre Schaeffer's Société De Radiodiffusion De La France D'Outre-Mer or SORAFOM, a colonial broadcasting service that worked across Francophone Africa. A pianist, recordist and photographer, Duvelle ran the Ocora label for much of the 1960s and 70s and undertook some of its most ambitious recording expeditions in the early 60s.īorn in 1937 in Paris, he spent his childhood in South East Asia, and returned to France to study piano at Conservatoire De Paris.
Charles Duvelle died in Paris on 29 November, it’s been reported by Le Monde.