Chris Isaak

Striking costume, slicked-up hair, powerful voice : Chris Isaak, a child of the sixties cradled by the ardour of Elvis, swims against the current to celebrate a rock with the scent of yesteryear. This crooner from California, optimistic by nature, plays with the ambient spleen to build an extraordinary musical empire.
 
Out of fashion, Chris Isaak, worthy heir to Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and the great Elvis Presley, is a headwind, gracefully freezing time. This contemporary cowboy, ready to draw his second-hand Gibson J-200 at the slightest emotion, makes a mockery of trends and eras. A charming smile, an aerodynamic hairstyle, clothes in electric colours: the rough diamond from Stockton, a discreet town in California, sets his suave and languorous voice to velvet melodies, in the tradition of his childhood heroes, like Leadbelly and Hank Williams, whom he used to listen to on an old, barely functional electrophone.
 
In a way, Chris Isaak, who comes from a very modest family, has always been one step behind, and there lies the paradox. Because the American crooner, a former talented boxer, whose nose still bears the stigma, always knocks at the right time, and without warning, to get rid of the mass with hits that came out of nowhere, that nobody believed in. Blue Hotel was announced as a commercial failure by its label at the time, Wicked Game as a shipwreck: they became worldwide successes. Yes, this unfailing lover of Roy Orbison, who defines himself as the median between a poet and a redneck, could have fallen into oblivion many times over. But the legacy he carries, and has been sculpting since the eighties, is his balancing point: Chris Isaak will never fall.
 
Thus, always in good humour, this dandy, extravagant by nature, breaking with the codes of political correctness, wonderfully revives the spirit of the sixties, injecting it with a dose of timeless modernity. Frugality, serenity, romanticism: Chris Isaak plays with adjectives to transform his adventures and anecdotes into a moving and energetic tribute to the rockabilly of all time.