Les Émouvantes 2024
Les Émouvantes
19-21 September 2024
Marseilles, France
Review by Ken Waxman
Photos by Susan O’Connor
Les Émouvantes 2024 was both the 13th iteration of the annual concert series and the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Les Émouvantes label by local bassist Claude Tchamitchian, the festival’s artistic director.
When the majority of performers at a music festival have an affiliation with a single record company, the impression of uniformity may be a threat. However, Les Émouvantes, which took place in Marseilles in late September, presented a cross-section of improvised music, including a performance by a group of musicians who have not recorded for the label.
This year’s concerts, which took place in the unpretentious Salle Audoli, part of the city’s downtown Conservatoire Pierre Barbizet, probed a spectrum of sounds from string-centred work that was substantially through-composed, electro-acoustic, measured free form, and variations on contemporary Jazz.
One mark of Les Émouvantes’ distance from rigidity was the final performance by tenor saxophonist Sylvain Cathala’s Print quintet, consisting of alto saxophonist Stéphane Payen, pianist Benjamin Moussay, bassist Jean-Philippe Morel and drummer Franck Vaillant, none of whom has recorded for the label.
Cathala’s set of compositions made full use of the group’s structural variety. With the backing of mallet pops on drum tops, supple double bass pulsations or string slices, confident piano-comping, and saxophone challenges and harmonies, full use of the band members’ talents were on display.
Encompassing stop-time interjections and segues into euphony, at their most mainstream the saxophonists created a modern version of unruffled swing without a note out of place. Yet at their freest, pivots to split tones, tongue flutters and broken tones substantiated the metal that lurked beneath the melodic. At one point Payen and Cathala spewed out a capella harmonies, but that theme later expanded into a resonating groove once drum beats kicked into gear.
Alternately, when more intense upwards movement was created by the saxophonists, piano, bass and drums fell into lockstep layering, which added to the modulations with press rolls and cymbal bell-ringing, keyboard clips and bass thumps. Overall, Print impressed with its sometimes effortless swing, but lacked a certain looseness.
Also wedded to swing – even without a drummer – but designing sounds to merge the poetic with the pressurized, was Tchamitchian’s Vortice Quartet.
French veterans who have explored stylistic leaps that encompass notated, folkloric and improvised motifs, the group consisted of the bassist, clarinetist Catherine Delaunay, alto/soprano saxophonist Christophe Monniot, and Bruno Angelini on piano and keyboards. Both Angelini and Monniot added a bit of electronic processing during their solos on the festival’s first night.
With shifts in pressure, timbre, string slaps and numerous stops, Tchamitchian made up for the absence of a drummer by maintaining a steady pulse. At the same time, his arco forays and deceptively simple pizzicato asides helped thicken the narrative underpinnings.
So did Angelini’s comping and judicious use of synthesized oscillations. That however, didn’t stop the pianist at other junctures to expand expositions with cross-pulsing and patterns, moving from one keyboard motif to another, as well as projecting ringing piano chords.
Monniot’s soprano sax trills interlocked with the clarinetist’s higher pitches. When playing alto, he alternated between foot-tapping swing abated by thick double bass pops and more intricate techniques, and strained his reed output with split tones, moderated honks and altissimo cries.
During one tune-ending solo, he prodded keyboard syncopation and bass thumps into a pronounced and intense Jazz affiliation. Connecting the muscular, the mellow and the melodic, the Tchamitchian four managed to create sounds that were both contemplative and canny.
The reed players too, had dual functions. Harmonizing often for storytelling, separation emphasized their different approaches. Delaunay’s forays into fluttering rondos with folkloric suggestions, accompanied by the pianist’s presto brightness, preserved the romantic airiness of some of Tchamitchian’s themes.
Those qualities could also be applied to the duo of pianist Sophia Domancich and percussionist Simon Goubert, which played during the first set of Les Émouvantes’ second night of concerts.
One of the most subtle percussionists, Goubert only gradually shook cymbals at the top and widened the dynamics with rim shots as Domancich responded with subtle slides and glissandi. Subsequently intensifying the interaction, she jiggled waves of pointed tones and low-pitched keyboard slices that were answered by hard cymbal smacks, drum shuffles, rolls and slaps. Attaining a dancing keyboard groove, she also dipped into the piano’s innards for echoes suggesting torqued passion, countered by the drummer with rat-tat-tats and rumbles.
Along with romantic lightness, the pianist also concentrated key and inner string dips and decorations into tougher comping. Her most common tonal resolution involved a light touch expressed in melodies and echoes, while Goubert was more forthcoming, although his solo breaks were as focused around unity as vigor. Drum clips, clanks, paradiddles, press rolls and pops flowed forcefully, sometimes unaccompanied. Yet while he may have highlighted hundreds of tones compared to Domancich’s handful, her herky-jerky timbral coloration was as crucial to duo evolution as his more upfront percussion emphasis.
Another drum-intense duo which pinpointed parallel improvisations opened the Salle Audoli-located festival on its first night. Featured were sophisticated percussionist Michele Rabbia and violinist Régis Huby, who played from within a circle of foot pedals.
The most self-effacing of the festival’s drummers, Rabbia rolled small balls on drum tops; rubbed tops with the bottom of a single drumstick; scratched both sides of his cymbals; used mallets for drum caresses, and occasionally blew on a wooden flute.
Equally circumspect, Huby’s isolated strokes were electrified and extended as they became louder, and eventually anchored a hazy melody. Contrasting string glissandi with positioned idiophone clips and two-sided bolo-bat-like beats, the two players gradually reached a climax of affiliated and responsive rhythms.
Other sets drew away from expected Jazz-improvised music tropes with mixed results. For instance, in the second set on the second evening, bassist Riccardo Del Fra united a Jazz trio of himself, pianist Carl-Henri Morisset and saxophonist/flutist Jan Prax to a seven-member string section of violinists Saori Furukawa, Anne Gaëlle Michel and Camille Coulet; violists Loic Abdelfettah and Jacques Perez; cellist Amandine Lefèvre and double bassist Emilie Legrand for a mostly through-composed musical portrait entitled “Une folle allure”.
In sharp contrast, the festival’s final set was called Stev’in My Mind that consisted of a funk-drenched tribute to Stevie Wonder, masterminded by trumpeter/flugelhornist Fabrice Martinez backed by keyboardist Bettina Kee, electric bassist Raymond Doumbe, guitarist Julien Lacharme and drummer Romaric N’Zaou.
In terms of Del Fra’s work, while composed to express an emotional feeling, there seemed to be a profound disconnect between the improvising trio and the strings. Whether tutti or in subsets, the string players frequently expressed sparkling glissandi and robust drones that appeared more whimsical and decorative than providing thematic advancement.
On the other hand, the bassist’s thick pizzicato breaks, lively and dramatic piano chording from Morisset, and Prax’s featured interludes appeared professionally correct but lacking emotion. Despite skilful efficiency in expressing melodies during interludes on clarinet, alto saxophone and flute, Prax’s orientation suggested excessive formalism as though he were being careful not to exceed the score’s limitations.
Stev’in My Mind lagged in an entirely different fashion. In spite of the set’s dedicatee, funk and R&B touches were often superseded by theatrical Heavy Rock flanges from the guitarist; turns towards juddering reggae rhythms (Doumbe) or solid Afro beats (N’Zaou) from the rhythm section; and a penultimate interlude where Kee sang in English a folkloric ballad that suggested Stevie Nicks rather than Stevie Wonder.
Martinez had full command of both his amplified horns, but while his up-the-scale bugling and measured portamento blasts were probably meant to evoke Miles Davis-like fusion, most of the solos seemed closer to Herb Alpert’s brief late 1970s foray into rhythm-heavy disco and funk.
Except for a somewhat showy drum solo near the set’s end, N’Zaou fared best throughout, since he regularly broke up the time, staying away from an overriding backbeat which would be more common with a project like this.
Hits or misses, the sheer variety of musics presented during this lucky 13th edition of Les Émouvantes’ festival as well as previous editions, confirmed the importance of both it and the Émouvantes label to the cultural scene in Marseilles and France itself. With many varieties of creative music presented annually, most sets are successful. Long-term, whether every project succeeded on its merits was less important than having a forum for the public to experience these sounds live.
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