Brexit Music

Description

Baptiste Trotignon makes his grand return to the jazz trio with an album dedicated to English pop. From The Beatles to Radiohead, passing through Queen and the Rolling Stones; the French pianist demonstrates all his talents as an arranger by adapting the greatest melodies from a mythical repertoire, accompanied by Matt Penman on double bass and Greg Hutchinson on drums.
“BREXIT MUSIC is not a political album! But it probably contains in its title - which came to me long after the idea of the repertoire - a certain taste for irony that is quite British: in the end, art will survive all social whims!
I mainly wanted a very fresh, playful sound here, a lot of groove and a bit of humor… A real game in a way, but done seriously! The intense presence of Matt [Penman] and Greg [Hutchinson] contributes a lot to that.
Covering a well-known song is something common among jazz musicians, and like many others, I have often done it in small touches, but the idea of a whole album exclusively around English pop music was not obvious: staying alive and “fun” without the lyrics with the often very simple material of the songs, and even if most of them happily and excitingly accompanied my teenage years, it’s a challenge!
And then little by little, while digging especially into the 70s, a crazy period of creativity, I got into the game, sometimes rearranging-disturbing the melodies with the language that is most familiar to me, and sometimes playing them just as they are, and then it’s simply the sound of the acoustic jazz trio piano/bass/drums that creates the surprise.
Jazz and pop (rock, chanson, etc.) musicians have sometimes been like old rival brothers... And yet in both worlds, you can hear the same sublime violence and this very assertive thirst for freedom, simply expressed in very different ways.
Jazz was a very popular and revolutionary music long before the arrival of rock exuberance, whose animality - which I love! - contrasted with the so-called more scholarly music of which jazz is a part with its complex harmonies and rhythms.
Why not try to combine the two? Keeping in mind this form of loving and poetic resistance common to ALL music.”
Baptiste Trotignon, May 2023