L'ODYSSEE DE PAUL LAY (vinyl)

Description

Paul Lay is releasing a new trio album titled L'Odyssée. Inspired by Homer’s vast poem, Paul translates the epic of Ulysses across the seas and foreign worlds, populated by fantastical creatures (the Cicones, Polyphemus, Charybdis and Scylla, the Sirens, Tiresias, Calypso...). With L'Odyssée, he confirms his calling as a composer, inventing astonishing colors and soundscapes. “This Odyssey is a great and splendid musical journey that extends the adventure of the most famous sailor in the world of jazz, to whom, as a great improviser, he seems to have always belonged thanks to Paul Lay.” Homer’s Odyssey has accompanied me since childhood. It was while reading it to my son during the 2020 pandemic that I rediscovered, in a new light, certain passages of the Homeric poem. Little by little, melodies came to me that turned into obsessive little refrains. The repertoire gradually took shape as I transcribed, over several months, these inner scores directly inspired by Ulysses’ adventures. Each stage traced on the map of Ulysses’ journey builds an element of response to the quest for self-identity and questions the human condition. That is why the chronological framework did not seem to me the most suitable for conveying the multiplicity of registers in L'Odyssée and the richness of its questions. Ulysses appears as the hero of an epic of absence, of loss, of the return that is endlessly delayed. I therefore chose to place myself after his return to Ithaca, when the hero must reconquer his identity even though he has become “Nobody” — that is how he presents himself to the Cyclops Polyphemus. The musical narrative is thus made up of the reminiscences of his journey. Ulysses’ theme, written for solo piano, opens the album and serves as its leitmotif; it returns three times, in the form of variations. It concentrates the hero’s many emotional states, particularly his doubts and fears, mixed with the irrepressible desire to face them, to find Penelope and his own people again. I focused on the main trials and perils overcome by Ulysses, through which man builds himself by finding his limits, by abandoning pride and vanity, by making the opposing forces his own, by reactivating the memory of his origins, his home, and his traditions. Understanding L'Odyssée requires an inner journey that makes it possible to return to the world through self-knowledge, to transform appearances, to go beyond the dangers represented by the distorting gaze of the other and the deceptive reflection of the mirror. Thus the dog Argos recognizes his master when he returns after twenty years’ absence in the guise of a stranger. This movement is the story of a gradual revelation of deep identity. As for the score that accompanies it, which I worked on for more than a year, it is up to the listener to find in it a meaning and correspondences of their own.