When the light from one of the most ethereally spellbinding stars in the jazz firmament flickered out with https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/02/wayne-shorter-icon-of-jazz-saxophone-dies-aged-89" rel="nofollow - the death of Wayne Shorter at 89 this month, the great improviser and composer left a multiplicity of ways to remember him. A tersely powerful tenor saxophonist, Shorter, like his mentor John Coltrane, cultivated a contrastingly pensive, vulnerable, and even unsentimentally romantic persona with the delicately oboe-like and tonally temperamental soprano sax.
That fickle instrument, pioneered and almost exclusively played from the 1920s to the 50s in voice-like, vibrato-trembling tones by the New Orleans genius Sidney Bechet, was otherwise largely neglected in jazz until Dixielander turned trailblazer Steve Lacy’s postwar partnerships with https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/08/cecil-taylor-obituary" rel="nofollow - Cecil Taylor and https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2017/nov/06/get-inside-the-music-the-ineffable-genius-of-thelonious-monk" rel="nofollow - Thelonious Monk , and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQvc-Gkwhow" rel="nofollow - Coltrane’s My Favourite Things in 1961.
In recent years the impish French original Émile Parisien has proven a brilliant inheritor of those soprano traditions – Bechet particularly. He’s a prominent presence on this lyrical yet quirky quartet set. Les égarés means “those who stray”, which aptly characterises genre-hoppers like Parisien, Malian kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, improvising cellist Vincent Segal and accordion virtuoso https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/13/london-jazz-festival-michael-wollny-tomasz-stanko" rel="nofollow - Vincent Peirani .
The tracklist is diverse and constantly surprising. Steady kora hooks quietly drive song-like soprano and cello lines towards the release of soaring, jazzily agile accordion improv; slow folk-ballad themes turning to whirling Anatolian shindigs; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRiVTs6MHW8" rel="nofollow - Joe Zawinul’s Orient Express is a churning groove of accordion chords that frame Parisien’s seductively soft-edged, whispery tones; Esperanza is a joyous, klezmer-like dance.
Parisien’s Dou is a dreamy sax melody with the composer at his most Bechet-like, while Peirani’s Nomad’s Sky often suggests an imploring voice, with softly whooping soprano sounds rising over long arco-cello chords. If ever there was a powerful argument for jazz being an attitude to music-making rather than a genre, it’s this rare gem.
from www.theguardian.com