Amall

Description

Since the early 60s, François Rabbath’s double bass has resonated across enough recordings to fill several shelves of a record collection. Arranger, composer, musician, the mark he has left on music goes far beyond his collaborations with Barbara, Paco Ibanez, Charles Aznavour, or Edith Piaf. It is to him that aspiring double bass players owe an innovative method for learning the instrument. Born into a lush musical world that quickly became his own, it was first on his travels that his son Sylvain accompanied him, before settling at the piano and touring the world’s stages by his side. Those years in which continents, countries, and cities followed one another became a source for composing Amall, the album by the Rabbath Electric Orchestra. Born of these wanderings, the tracks took their final colors once brought back into the studio, refined and then, finally, conceived to invite the guitars of Keziah Jones and Matthieu Chedid, the piano of Laurent de Wilde, the bass of Victor Wooten, the saxophone of Raphaël Imbert, the percussion of Minino Garay. Sublimated by the scale of the jazz-soul orchestrations, by the richness of the arrangements bursting from the strings, brass, rhythms, and keyboards, the epic breath was imprinted. The urban nervousness of funk found its place. Melancholic and melodic, expressive and nervous, the double bass played with the bow, in the high notes of the neck where few venture, established itself as a musical guide. The one that traces the path between Seville and Minneapolis, linking François Rabbath’s native Syria to France, reducing the distance between South America and Europe. Giving the note to follow, the emotion that will run through the piece, it was side by side that father and son extended their bond beyond purely family and artistic limits. And their hands had never clasped so tightly.