Parisien

“The best new thing that has happened in European jazz for a long time” (Le Monde), Emile Parisien has formed a top-flight American-European sextet for this album, his seventh as leader or co-leader on ACT. The band will be touring in 2022, the year which also marks the tenth anniversary of Parisien’s first appearance on an ACT album.

Abrazo. Embrace. A close dance perhaps, but also with the hint of a friendly tussle. Could there be a more fitting metaphor for the duo of accordionist Vincent Peirani and soprano saxophonist Émile Parisien? "It's like a marriage," says Peirani. "In the beginning everything’s just great, wonderful, paradise. But of course, after a while, it also becomes challenging, which is quite normal. "Right now, we're just massively happy playing together." There can be very few musicians who have got to know each other as well as Peirani and Parisien have. They have clocked up well over 1000 concerts together in the past decade, of which more than 600 have been as a duo. They first met in 2012 as members of drummer Daniel Humair’s quartet, and their very first appearance as a duo was an impromptu late-night club set while touring in Korea. "Une ca-ta-strophe! An unmitigated disaster".

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.

New quartet Sissoko Segal Parisien Peirani presents "Les Égarés" (The wandering), an album recorded by two virtuoso duos (Sissoko-Segal and Peirani-Parisien), who for years have excelled in the art of cross-fertilising sounds and transcending genres.

The trio format has always been something of an ideal for Jan Lundgren. That particular buzz when communication between the musicians in a trio is direct, immediate and ever-present…when the trio keeps a constant sense of forward motion and development…when the players collectively remain open to the inspiration of every millisecond. These are the virtues which Lundgren sees as the recipe for the kind of openness, freedom, subtlety and excellence of a trio at its best.