On my Release Radar this week, there was a track called Secret by an artist with the curious name of Yom. Nothing grabs the attention of Crotchety Man faster than the itch of curiosity and, tout suite, he was trawling the Internet for information on the musician.
A Google search for “yom musician” produces an overview that says his genre is Hip-Hop/Rap. But the single that Spotify offered was a gentle clarinet and piano duet. There could hardly be a more contrasting Google hit. In the fervent hope that Google has completely missed the target, Yom‘s discography on Spotify was consulted. It lists 10 albums with release dates between 2008 and 2021, and, judging by the title, one of them could have been written especially for this blog. It’s called Songs for the Old Man.
“A collection of folk songs [written for the clarinet] that I “sing” for my father, to my father, but also to all those who spend their lives on the road: nomads, hobos, displaced persons, refugees …”
Yom’s website (translated from the original French).
If that sounds as promising to you as it did to me, I can assure you that you will enjoy the whole of that album.
My research has found almost no biographical information on Yom. He was born Guillaume Humery in Paris on 26th March 1980. And that tiny scrap is all we have in the Crotchety files. He does have a page on the French Wikipedia site, but even that adds only that he was inspired to take up the clarinet when he heard Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf at the age of 5. So, we will have to be content for the man to be defined by his music.
Crotchety Man 