EMERSON ENIGMA (vinyl)

Description

Founder of the band Emerson Lake & Palmer, pianist and composer Keith Emerson was the first to incorporate concerto-style piano pieces, to manipulate the sounds of the Hammond organ to give it a provocative character. This daring approach captivated youth around the world, selling over 49 million albums! It is this enigma that Thierry Eliez aims to unravel with his project EMERSON ENIGMA.A chameleon of legendary discretion, whose reputation is well-established thanks to an admirable career, Thierry Eliez was first an 11-year-old prodigy, profoundly affected by this musical revolution. Our young piano virtuoso, a Hammond enthusiast, was fascinated by the creativity of Emerson, a mad composer who invented unknown sounds and combined them with great classical works by Janácek, Bach, Mussorgsky, Bartók, Prokofiev... and even jazz with powerful evocations of Scott Joplin, Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Smith, or Jack McDuff.Emerson had an absolute passion for improvisation and jazz, and Thierry Eliez has made it a way of life: "Music must be as elegant as it is powerful, unbound by norms, constantly at risk, emulative, and continually transcended," he says... "Exploring Keith Emerson's music is a way of paying tribute to the curiosity that guided my career," confides Thierry Eliez. Far from a mere reinterpretation of Keith Emerson's work, his new album EMERSON ENIGMA offers us the keys to Keith Emerson's enigmatic, luxuriant, avant-garde, and singular oeuvre, which imposed English progressive music on the rest of the world. Thierry Eliez recounts and sublimates Emerson's work by merging several pieces from different albums by Emerson Lake & Palmer and The Nice. He freely conceives, following Emerson's cherished principle of association, combined suite arrangements of original pieces, classical works, and improvisations.After forty years of improvised and deliberately eclectic explorations, Thierry Eliez once again breaks new ground with his new album EMERSON ENIGMA. He imagines a particularly demanding all-acoustic instrumentation and writes the arrangements for it. In place of electronic sounds, Thierry Eliez imposes the powerful and generous sound of the Fazioli Grand Piano with absolute and breathtaking mastery. He invites the 'String Quartet,' now called 'Manticore,' to blend jazz improvisations and chamber music in a breathtaking, fusion-like interplay."We had to preserve the surreal and grandiose dimension of the works, without forgetting that most of them are also songs," emphasizes Thierry Eliez. Thus, as good things never come alone, Thierry Eliez also performs vocals, sometimes solo, with a warm, broad, and mature voice, whistling at times, or in a duet with the metamorphic vocalist Ceilin Poggi, dazzling in the diversity of her repertoires (sacred music, baroque, opera buffa, or jazz). Together they delve into the symbolic and surreal dimension of the lyrics by Greg Lake and Pete Sinfield with that dose of crazy, offbeat, even theatrical humor... so British!