Alain Badiouamore

A professional musician at a very early age, Alain Caron is a considerably accomplished bass player. He attended the Berklee College of Music. One of his first excursions into jazz was playing with the Vic Vogel Big Band during the 1970s. In 1977 he co-founded the group UZEB. Their first album, Live in Bracknell, was released in 1981. The following year saw the group putting out Fast Emotion. The next album was 1984's You Be Easy. 1985 saw them release Between the Lines. Two more live albums, Live a l'Olympia and Absolutely Live came out in 1986. The group released Noisy Nights and Live in Europe in 1988. The following year saw the release of UZEB Club. World Tour '90 was released in 1990. In 1992, Caron formed his own group, le Band and released the first album by that group, Alain Caron – le Band.

This CD is a bass lover's dream, for it features bass duets by Alain Caron and Michel Donato, with occasional percussion. Caron contributed six songs, Donato brought in two, and the duo also plays "Django" and "A Child Is Born." The interplay between the two bassists (Caron usually plays electric while Donato is mostly on acoustic bass) is the main reason to acquire this disc. Their styles are complementary, they constantly react to each other's ideas, and the results hold one's interest throughout.

A solitaire in French is a single mounted jewel, a concept that seems less than apt for the rather hefty works recorded here by British pianist Kathryn Stott. But this fine recital holds together in another way: Ravel, who so often provides the temporal endpoint for traditional piano recitals, is here, to a greater or lesser extent, the launching point for the other three composers featured. Stott's reading of the neoclassical Le Tombeau de Couperin is beautifully precise and balanced, catching the economy of this Baroque-style suite to the hilt. That economy carries over into the later works, even the rarely performed Piano Sonata of Henri Dutilleux, a work that deftly fuses Ravel's sense of classical forms with a largely dissonant language. The opening Prelude and Fugue of Jehan Alain, actually two separate works that are reasonably enough combined here, is another seldom-played piece that makes an arresting curtain-raiser, and the final "Le baiser de l'Enfant Jésus" of Messiaen, part of the giant Vingt regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, is the splendid climax of the whole, its spiritual, dreamlike ascent at the end superbly controlled. Better still is the sound, recorded at Hallé St. Peters in Manchester: it creates a hypnotic effect all its own.

Battre la chamade, être dans le coaltar, au fur et à mesure… Alain Rey décortique 200 expressions de la langue française avec humour et érudition. Et quand quelques-unes sont pimentées par Stéphane De Groodt, virtuose du jeu de mots, c'est encore plus savoureux! À découvrir en version Kindle. …