Parisien 11

French saxophonist Émile Parisien, instigator of some of the most musical, formidably skilful yet wackily diverting adventures in recent European jazz, makes a rare UK visit in a duo at November’s London jazz festival, but this exuberant album rams home the full Parisien experience, with a new quintet, regular accordion partner Vincent Peirani, and two revered European elder statesmen in German pianist Joachim Kühn and French bass clarinet original Michel Portal. From the opening vibrato-trembling soprano sax Préambule (Parisien can be a spiky avantist, but he’s a devoted Sidney Bechet admirer, too), through the hard-swinging Poulp – which sounds like the work of a 21st-century Hot Club band with Ornette Coleman leanings – through the contemporary-noir doom-walk of Brainmachine or the accordion-throbbing Umckaloabo, Parisien leads an exhilarating genre-hop bubbling with captivating remakes of US and European jazz traditions. And Kühn, a majestic soloist inside or outside conventional harmony, sounds as if he’s been an instantly responsive communicator with this lineup – and particularly the leader – for years.

On May 28, 2023, composer György Ligeti would have turned 100 years old. French saxophonist Emile Parisien and Italian pianist Roberto Negro approach Ligeti's String Quartet No. 1 "Métamorphoses nocturnes" - with the means of improvisation and at the same time great respect for the original.

When accidents happen, they are normally over in seconds, sometimes minutes; this one has been going on for 20 years. It is two decades since the members of Emile Parisien’s quartet played a jam session together. At the end, they looked at each other in disbelief. They had not just been hit by a collective musical thunderbolt, they also knew they had just brought…well…something…into being. The common ground between them was jazz, but each had all kinds of seeds to sow in it, from classical music and contemporary sounds to rock, electronica and chanson. Saxofonist Emile Parisien, Pianist Julien Touéry, Bassist Ivan Gélugne and drummer Julien Loutelier rip up labels, break down barriers, upset codes, and yet they know exactly where they are headed. There is a shared obsession with narrative. “The central axis of the quartet has always been storytelling,” Parisien emphasizes.