Joy

Description

The adventure of this album is a beautiful story. It all begins with the triumphant trio led by Sylvain Beuf with Franck Agulhon and Diego Imbert, a twin rhythm section with an almost telepathic rapport. In February 2009, on the occasion of a concert at the Duc des Lombards, Sylvain decided to flesh out his music and expand it to the scale of a quintet. To strengthen the trio and discover new orchestral colors on a repertoire made up of standards, he called on Denis Leloup, master of the slide trombone, and Pierrick Pedron, fiery alto player. “For a long time, Pierrick, a mad lover of the saxophone like me, had caught my ear. In his playing, there is a tremendous projection of sound and an improvisational energy that very quickly won me over.” Shortly after this first concert, an improbable yet magical love encounter shook up his life and fired his imagination. It sparked the desire to write for this new ensemble and stirred in him “the desire to bring joy, that irrepressible joy of transforming my vision of music. The writing came in a free and spontaneous outpouring. From the 15th to the end of April, I wrote, day and night, the entire repertoire, I orchestrated everything in a state of creative euphoria I had never known before. I didn’t have to search. I found, naturally, without overthinking.” At the beginning of May, Sylvain Beuf called Françoise Devienne, the fairy godmother of the Jazz Club de Dunkerque, where the quintet was scheduled for June. “I told her that the group had metamorphosed into a sextet with the addition of a pianist, Jean-Yves Jung, whose astonishing possibilities I had been able to appreciate with the Paris Jazz Big Band. With her usual enthusiasm, Françoise agreed immediately. With the help of the Fondation BNP Paribas, a fourth concert evening was even offered to us. From there, the idea germinated in me to take advantage of this opportunity to record a live album, a first and a new risk for me.” He spoke about it with Julien Birot, one of the very best sound engineers of his generation. Seduced by the idea, Julien and his partner Sébastien Barthélemy quickly offered to produce the album on their label Such Production. The four Dunkirk nights, from June 3 to 6, went by like a dream. The joyful company played this brand-new repertoire with contagious fire before an audience that was completely won over. “The beautiful story continues,” Sylvain marvels. At 45, Beuf has now realized that the saxophone is no longer his only horizon. “I have decided to devote more time to writing. From now on, I want to express myself through richer orchestral formations, such as the sextet or the octet. I also dream of a big band, even a symphony orchestra. I am finally confident in my ability to write music for ensemble. In my writing, the attraction of blues and Afro-American music coexists, of course, with influences from European traditional music. Thus on ‘Suspect Noise,’ I started from a deliberately Hispanic atmosphere.” To feed his partners’ imagination, Sylvain chose open forms with incessant changes of rhythm. To invent in the heat of the moment, in the fire of playing, not music to prove something, but simply to feel the happiness of being together. Freshness and spontaneity, generosity and availability, urgency and passion are the ingredients that explain the success of this album. A friend of Sylvain Beuf for more than twenty years, but also president of the Jazz Club de Dunkerque, I am today happy that these two passions come together in such a dazzling result. “Joy” is its name.