Airelle Besson

Already a well-established name on the European jazz scene, at the end of 1979 came the decisive meeting in Rome with the trumpet player Chet Baker. Riccardo Del Fra played alongside Chet for about nine years both in Europe and Japan on tours, for the radio and for the television; a collaboration which led to the recording of twelve albums, videos (Live in London at the Ronnie Scott) and the movie Chet s Romance directed by Bertrand Fevre. Chet's death in 1988 curtailed their partnership, but 25 years later the Marciac festival commissioned Del Fra to lead an ambitious project uniting a jazz quintet with a classical orchestra to play tunes associated with the doomed trumpeter.

A few years after the success of her album crossing Baroque music with folk, Love I Obey (ALPHA538), the Franco-American singer Rosemary Standley visits Schubert, this time with the complicity of the Ensemble Contraste: ‘We all have a few notes of Schubert buried deep inside us’ say the artists, who have got together around his music and brought to it an original sound texture, the result of their varied influences – classical, pop, jazz, folk.