OVER THE CLOUDS (vinyl)

Description

"Due to the vicissitudes of life and the passage of time, six years have elapsed since my last trio recording, my electronic experiments having taken precedence over this more acoustic format. I missed this lineup all the more because I was eager to incorporate the lessons learned from my sonic adventures into new compositions: how to broaden the traditional vocabulary of the trio, with its risks, its intrinsic fragility, its language rooted in a tradition that is constantly evolving? So, for the occasion, I decided to reconnect with my New York past and invite my old friend Ira Coleman to this session, with whom I hadn't worked for a very long time, as he was busy with groups like Herbie Hancock, Dee Dee Bridgewater, or Sting, and to secure the participation of Clarence Penn, one of the most subtle and musical drummers of his generation. Without consulting each other, Ira and I realized that the years had increased our attraction to African music in its different geographies: Mali, Cameroon, Nigeria. There is a formidable pool of rhythms and melodies there that are just waiting to blend with the more Western language of contemporary jazz, and we were very eager to experiment with this marriage. I am the first to be surprised by the music that emerged from it. A lot of energy, but also long stretches of a calm that I didn't know I was capable of, and which make me realize that, with age, one's gaze sees further and fixes on a clearer and more sensitive horizon, where the air is purer, somewhere beyond the clouds." Laurent de Wilde