Spezial snack

Description

Copious and appetizing, the album by Emile Parisien - Artist of the Year at the 2014 Victoires du Jazz - and his loyal accomplices keeps us on the edge of our seats from start to finish! Ten years ago, at the beginning of his career, Emile Parisien's quartet still expressed itself in the language of swing, offering a wild hard bop enhanced by brief bursts of free jazz and modern dissonances. While "Spezial Snack" seems light-years away from the music they were offering back then, the trajectory that led them to this terra incognita is nonetheless logical. Intact, the group's identity has simply matured through demanding questions. "Haricot-guide," the latest born of their cartoonish vein, is the relentless demonstration of this. What separates this piece from the somewhat clichéd blues with which they made their entrance on stage? The same cohesion of sound, which grabs you from the very first measures. The same light sense of parody. The same playful and natural way of undermining these outdated chord progressions through the elasticity of the rhythm, through micro-events, timbre games. Very quickly, they developed their own palette, their way of playing, through interactions, through glances that circulate. An unexpected cymbal crash, a piano cluster, some noisy hatching... These little things gradually invaded their music until they became the raw material. In "Flics de la police," an embryonic melody carves its way through a savanna of exotic rhythms. Music is first and foremost a territory, alternately desert-like and abundant, where the listener's vigilance is constantly engaged. The lyricism, around which their scripted collages were articulated, is no longer a condition but a hypothesis, and orchestrations have become as central as those of the 20th-century composers they admire. In a realm beyond the blue note, the melody of "Mazout Damnation" develops in constantly unexpected ways. Darkness, or light? Ascension, or fall? A few expressionist chords open the floodgates: a deluge of notes, an autistic riff, savagery. This quartet is the heir to those experimenters who threw open the windows of codified genres, in music as elsewhere. In our hyper-referenced era, it has chosen the most radical path. It is our indispensable contemporary.