Jean-Marie Machado: Como as Flores (RJAL 397052)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Zé Luis Nascimento drums, percussion
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios la Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded April 2024 and mixed May 2024 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro with RJAL for La Buissonne 
Release date: January 23, 2026

After a series of ambitious, large-scale projects that stretched outward in many directions, pianist and composer Jean-Marie Machado turns inward and returns to the elemental with this luminous trio recording. The gesture feels less like a reduction than a distillation, as if years of orchestral color and structural ambition have been pressed slowly into a sweet-smelling essence. The album’s title, Como as Flores, translated from Portuguese as “Like Flowers,” names the guiding metaphor with quiet elegance. A flower does not argue for its beauty. It opens. Fragrance spreads through the air without instruction, invisible yet unmistakable. In much the same way, Machado’s music unfolds here with an unforced grace, each note blooming from the last, each phrase releasing a delicate aroma of feeling. With Brazilian percussionist Zé Luis Nascimento and bassist Claude Tchamitchian beside him, Machado enters a kind of musical relativity where gravity and flight continually exchange roles.

“Romantic Spell” begins like the moment one falls into a lover’s arms and forgets where the body ends. The opening breath carries warmth and ease, a gentle suspension that seems to hover between waking and dream. Piano chords drift like petals across still water. Tchamitchian’s bass speaks in soft murmurs, grounding the trio in a tender gravity. Nascimento introduces colors that shimmer at the edges of perception. Curtains sway in moonlight somewhere within the music. A slow tide of emotion gathers its strength. Everything feels receptive, open, full of promise.

From this intimate beginning, “Valsa Ouriço” arrives with a sudden brightness that resembles the first flash of morning light through an open window. Energy crackles through the trio’s playing. Machado’s piano lines spiral and leap with the exhilaration of new affection. The piece carries the buoyancy of ocean waves, rising and falling with a natural elasticity. Nascimento’s percussion reveals astonishing sensitivity here. Each gesture lands with the precision of a brushstroke in a finely detailed painting. The rhythmic patterns do more than support the melody. They sing alongside it, adding hues that feel melodic in their own right. His hands seem to conjure entire landscapes with the lightest touch.

In “De Memorias e de Saudade,” time slows until each note lingers in warm air. Nostalgia inhabits the space without turning heavy. The music resembles the quiet contemplation of an old garden where memory and present sensation mingle freely. Machado allows silence to bloom between phrases. The ascent begins with “Le Voleur de Fleurs,” a piece that climbs with patient determination before releasing itself into radiant flight. One hears echoes of wandering through fields thick with color, the senses saturated by scent and sunlight. Nascimento becomes particularly vivid here, his playing lush and expansive. A few strokes across skin or wood seem capable of summoning vast distances. The percussion glows with a deep golden warmth. One could almost imagine pollen drifting through the air.

Shadows appear briefly in “Our Tears Never Cried,” where slight dissonances introduce a delicate ache. Even flowers contain a kind of fragility. Their beauty persists beside the knowledge of how easily they can wilt and detach from their stems. Machado leans into that ambiguity, shaping phrases that hover between sweetness and sorrow. The trio then turns toward Miles Davis with a supple and groove-laden interpretation of “Nardis.” Familiar territory becomes fertile soil for improvisation. Machado’s touch balances clarity and mystery, while Tchamitchian and Nascimento weave a rhythmic fabric that moves with graceful inevitability.

“Piuma,” performed as a piano solo, offers one of the album’s coziest moments. The title suggests a feather, something light enough to drift through the air. Machado plays with remarkable restraint, allowing tenderness to accumulate slowly. Beneath the softness lies a quiet melancholy, the subtle awareness that love carries its own permeability. Feelings pass through us like wind through branches, leaving movement long after the breeze itself has gone.

Tchamitchian then steps forward with his arco introduction to “Perdido em Clareza.” The bowed bass opens a clearing within the album’s poignant terrain. When the trio joins together, they settle into a mid-tempo dance marked by playful curiosity. There is a childlike wonder in the way the themes unfold, as though the musicians are discovering their shapes in real time.

“Transvida” turns the spotlight toward Nascimento in a percussion showcase that reveals the full breadth of his expressive vocabulary. His playing suggests rain striking leaves, wind traveling across dry earth, and footsteps crossing hidden paths through a forest.

The closing piece, “L’Endormi,” inhabits a more dreamlike register. Frame drum pulses softly beneath harmonic bowing from Tchamitchian. Machado’s piano carries a darker hue, as if twilight has settled over the garden that opened at the beginning of the album. The music drifts through strange and beautiful terrain where shadows possess their own quiet luminosity.

Yet the deeper resonance of Como as Flores extends beyond individual tracks. Flowers appear here not simply as decoration but as a philosophy of form. Each composition grows organically, rooted in attentive listening and mutual responsiveness. Nothing is forced open. Each musical gesture unfolds in its proper season. One hears the trio tending their sound the way a gardener tends living soil, trusting the invisible processes that allow life to emerge.

Perhaps that is the quiet wisdom contained in Machado’s return to the trio format. Creation often resembles cultivation rather than construction. One prepares the ground, listens carefully to the conditions of light and rain, then waits with patience for something unexpected to appear. A garden cannot be commanded into bloom. It answers only to care, curiosity, and time. In that sense, music and flowers share a secret. Both reveal how beauty enters the world without force, rising gently from hidden roots that continue their work long beneath the surface.

Vincent Courtois/Robin Fincker/Daniel Erdmann: Lines for Lions (RJAL 397051)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Courtois cello
Daniel Erdmann tenor saxophone
Robin Fincker clarinet and tenor saxophone
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at La Buissonne Studios, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded November 25-26 and mixed December 2024 by Gérard de Haro
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Release date: November 7, 2025

Cellist Vincent Courtois returns in the company of tenor saxophonists Daniel Erdmann and Robin Fincker, forming a trio that feels at once improbable and inevitable. Three voices that might easily collide instead interweave, tracing bright arcs through open air. The instrumentation alone promises unusual geometry. Two reeds converse above the dark grain of cello, a chamber ensemble with the pulse of jazz and the curiosity of explorers who have misplaced their compass on purpose.

The album’s title gestures toward the tune Gerry Mulligan wrote in 1952 as a tribute to Jimmy Lyons, a figure closely tied to the legacy of the Monterey Jazz Festival. That piece eventually became a touchstone of West Coast jazz, known for its luminous melodic contour and breezy contrapuntal motion. Those qualities hover like a distant ancestor throughout this recording. The trio does not imitate that tradition. Instead, they treat it as a horizon, a place toward which melodic clarity travels even while the music wanders through stranger terrain.

The group thrives on the friction of difference. Erdmann’s tenor carries a weathered edge, a tone where breath scratches against metal and every note seems carved from bark. Fincker offers a contrasting ease, especially when he turns to clarinet and lets its rounded voice float through the ensemble like a ribbon of smoke. Courtois stands at the center of this triangulation. His cello provides gravity, yet it refuses to remain merely foundational. At one moment it functions as bass, grounding the harmony with muscular pizzicato. At another it becomes a singer, bow drawing long shadows across the musical landscape. Through this constant transformation the trio achieves a peculiar equilibrium. The music feels airborne while remaining tethered to a deep structural spine. We can see all of these qualities reflected in their writing, which is fairly well distributed throughout the set.

Vincent Courtois: Architectures of Motion

Courtois composes as someone who thinks orchestrally even within the tight confines of a trio. His pieces often hinge on physical movement. Lines stretch, recoil, then leap again as if guided by invisible pulleys.

“Alone in Fast Lane” opens the album with an immediate surge of energy. The two tenors ignite like twin flares, each tracing its own spiraling path while the cello pulses beneath them with restless purpose. Courtois’s pizzicato acts as both skeleton and engine. The sound possesses a remarkable clarity. One hears the music’s anatomy in real time. Nerves spark through the reeds while the cello functions as spinal cord, transmitting impulses that set the whole organism in motion. The result is a texture both taut and exuberant, a kind of high velocity counterpoint that never loses its center.

“Seven Lines for Old Mediums” inhabits a different climate. The music becomes pointillistic, almost painterly. Notes appear like small constellations rather than extended phrases. Courtois allows silence to speak with unusual authority. Each gesture hangs in the air for a moment before dissolving, inviting the listener to lean closer. The piece suggests a quiet meditation on the past, not through nostalgia but through delicate fragments that recall older languages without repeating them.

“Adios Body (Hello Soul)” carries a melody built on a gentle octave leap, a motif that first arrives with lullaby tenderness. Gradually the texture thickens. The tenors begin to growl and circle each other in animated debate while the cello intervenes with calm authority, a mediator guiding two spirited interlocutors toward uneasy harmony. What begins in repose evolves into something almost theatrical. The music sheds its skin and reveals a more restless spirit beneath.

Daniel Erdmann: Conversations with a Crooked Smile

Erdmann’s writing introduces a playful angularity. His pieces often feel conversational, as though the ensemble has stumbled into a lively discussion at a café where every participant insists on finishing the other’s sentences.

“Mulholland Coffee Break” evokes exactly that sort of moment. The tune unfolds with relaxed swagger, a melody that seems to lean back in its chair while still maintaining a sly sense of rhythm. Courtois takes full advantage of the mood. His improvisation dives into unexpected harmonic corners, bow and fingers shifting roles with effortless agility. When Fincker’s clarinet arrives, it pours a warm gloss over the scene, thick with ease. One can almost imagine sunlight slanting through a window onto a cluttered tabletop of cups and scribbled notes.

“Finally Giovanni” thrives on whimsy. The two tenors chatter above Courtois’s buoyant pizzicato, their lines hopping and sidestepping like dancers improvising steps across a wooden floor. The tune’s charm lies in its elasticity. Themes stretch then snap back into place with mischievous delight. What might have been merely jaunty becomes something richer through the trio’s shared instinct for balance. Humor and precision coexist without strain.

Robin Fincker: Blues Through a Kaleidoscope

Fincker’s contributions bring a blues sensibility filtered through an exploratory imagination. His pieces often begin in recognizable territory before opening unexpected doors.

“There and Then” highlights the clarinet’s expressive warmth. A call and response emerges between it, tenor, and cello, each voice stepping forward then retreating into the weave. The blues inflection runs deep but never feels conventional. Courtois again proves a formidable improviser, his cello singing with both grit and tenderness.

“Lion’s Den” returns the trio to a denser thicket of interaction. A hint of bop flickers through the rhythmic undergrowth, yet the structure refuses to settle into predictable grooves. At the center, Courtois delivers a remarkable solo passage, a monologue that seems to narrate its own unfolding. Each phrase arrives with quiet agency, like a thought discovering its own meaning while being spoken.

“Hobo Clown” closes the album with a buoyant sense of motion. Playfulness becomes the guiding principle. The ensemble glides through shifting textures fluidly, revealing the full breadth of its dynamic and technical range. The music smiles without losing its intelligence. Every gesture feels alive to possibility.

In this sense the trio suggests a quiet philosophical lesson. Music does not merely express individuality. It also reveals how individuality expands when placed in conversation. Perhaps creativity resembles a kind of listening. One waits for another presence to enter the room, uncertain what it will change, curious about the space that will appear between the sounds. In that small interval something unexpected begins to breathe.

Jean-Marie Machado & Danzas Orchestra: Sinfonia (RJAL 397050)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Jean-Charles Richard chief conductor
Cécile Grassi viola
Cécile Grenier viola
Gwenola Morin viola
Guillaume Martigné cello
Clara Zaoui cello
Marc Buronfosse double bass
Élodie Pasquier clarinets
Stéphane Guillaume flutes, tenor saxophone
Renan Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
Tom Caudelle saxhorn
François Thuillier tuba
Didier Ithursarry accordion
Joachim Machado guitar
Marion Frétigny percussion, marimba, glockenspiel
Aubérie Dimpre percussion, vibraphone, glockenspiel
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios la Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded November and December 2023 and mixed April and June 2024 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne
All tracks composed and arranged by Jean-Marie Machado
Release date: January 24, 2025

Jean-Marie Machado has long composed as if mapping a living geography, each work another inlet along a coastline he continues to discover. Sinfonia, written for his Danzas Orchestra, arrives like a new tide upon that shore. Across more than three decades and thirty albums, from solitary piano meditations to the breadth of large ensembles, Machado has cultivated a language where jazz breathes with classical lungs. The celebrated Cantos Brujos revealed the power of this synthesis. Sinfonia deepens that current.

“Ria Largo” opens with gentle inevitability. Stepwise motifs shimmer like sunlight across tidal water while the glockenspiel scatters small sparks of brightness through the orchestral surface. The music glances backward through salt air toward older voyages and half-remembered ages, a harbor scene where departure feels imminent but the ropes have not yet been cast free.

From this threshold emerge three diptychs that move like successive swells. “Tanghoule” enters beneath a dimmer sky, its atmosphere shaped by the shadowed viola of Cécile Grenier. Didier Ithursarry’s accordion spreads a soft harmonic glow while Marc Buronfosse’s bass walks with deliberate tenderness. Renan Richard’s soprano saxophone floats through with poised lyricism, suspended between inward reflection and outward motion.

“Barcaronde” turns the vessel toward open water. Guitarist Joachim Machado begins amid flowing piano figures whose ripples widen across the ensemble. The cello of Guillaume Martigné gradually assumes the foreground, unfolding a patient monologue that draws surrounding voices into a finely woven tapestry. What begins as solitary expression becomes shared narrative. In “L’écume des rires,” vitality breaks through as accordion, clarinet, and tuba form a lively trio. Their quicksilver dialogue opens a chamber of inspired improvisation. The second half reveals a different character altogether, one that is brittle in appearance yet strangely resilient, like shells shaped by relentless tides.

“Barque magnétique” introduces a deeper nocturne through the baritone saxophone of Richard, whose dark buoyancy drifts across the ensemble like a lantern gliding over black water. Magic lingers here in quiet form, a subtle phosphorescence. “Dérive des cinq pas” centers on violist Cécile Grassi, whose line wanders through the ensemble with contemplative patience. Fragments of melody appear like objects discovered in tidal pools after the sea withdraws. The mood remains intimate, inviting the listener to lean closer.

Energy brightens with “Volte Flamme.” Stéphane Guillaume’s flute darts through the ensemble with birdlike agility while percussionists Marion Frétigny and Aubérie Dimpre construct an intricate terrain of rhythm. The electric guitar flashes through the texture with bright sparks, its voice cutting momentarily through the orchestral weave. Afterward, “Tréhourhant” offers a pause of quiet reflection. The piano speaks alone in restrained, mournful phrases that seem to measure the distance traveled.

The closing “Jig Raz” gathers the ensemble into a surge of unity. A geometric groove forms beneath wordless vocals that rise from the orchestral body like wind filling a sail. The music spirals upward with exuberant force, lifting itself like a waterspout climbing toward the clouds and carrying the listener into open air.

Yet the lasting resonance of Sinfonia lies deeper than imagery. Machado understands that the sea offers a way of thinking about sound itself. Music resembles water in its refusal of permanence. A phrase appears, glimmers briefly, then dissolves into the larger motion surrounding it. Improvisation becomes an act of listening to the present moment rather than attempting to capture it.

Standing before the ocean, one senses how small gestures participate in immense processes that began long before us and will continue long after. Machado and his orchestra seem content with that truth. They do not attempt to master the tide. They simply enter its rhythm and allow the music to move as it must. Perhaps that is the quiet lesson of Sinfonia. Meaning does not always arrive as a destination. Sometimes it reveals itself only while we drift.

The Magic Lantern: To Everything a Season (RJAL 397049)

| Tyran Grillo

Jamie Doe vocals
Fred Thomas bass
Matt Robinson piano
Dave Hamblett drums
Tobin Fincker tenor saxophone, clarinet
Matthieu Michel flugelhorn
Kieran McLeod trombone
Recorded August 1-4, 2023 at La Buissonne Studios by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mixed October 25-27, 2023 by Gérard de Haro, Fred Thomas, and Jamie Doe, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard and Jamie Doe
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Coproduced by Hectic Ecletic Records and La Buissonne Label
Release date: October 25, 2024

Some albums announce themselves with grand gestures. Others unfold more quietly, revealing their character with patience. The Magic Lantern’s To Everything a Season belongs firmly in the latter category. Led by Australian-born and UK-based songwriter Jamie Doe, the project has long occupied a space where folk songwriting intersects with the exploratory instincts of jazz and chamber music. On this latest release, those elements feel especially well balanced. The result is a record that moves gently but deliberately, trusting the strength of its poetry and the sensitivity of the musicians bringing it to life.

Recorded over four focused days at La Buissonne Studios in the south of France, the album captures the kind of immediacy that can only emerge when musicians share a room and respond to one another in real time. Engineer Gérard de Haro, recognizing the quiet intensity of the sessions, helped shape an environment where the performances could breathe without unnecessary interference. Rather than striving for polish, the recording preserves the subtle dynamics of collaboration. What emerges is not the sheen of perfection but the presence of discovery, the sound of ideas forming collectively in the moment.

The ensemble itself draws largely from London’s vibrant jazz community. Bassist Fred Thomas, who also co-arranges the material, anchors the music with lines that are patient and grounded. Matt Robinson’s piano moves between structure and openness, providing harmonic spaces for the others to inhabit. Dave Hamblett’s drumming rarely asserts itself forcefully, instead shaping rhythm with a light, responsive touch. Keiran McLeod’s trombone adds warmth and depth to the arrangements, its tone bending gently around the vocal lines. Two additional voices arrive from continental Europe: Robin Fincker’s searching tenor saxophone and Matthieu Michel’s flugelhorn, whose soft lyricism brings a reflective glow to several of the album’s most delicate moments. Together the septet demonstrates a remarkable commitment to restraint, treating silence and space as carefully as melody.

At the center of this balanced environment stands Doe’s voice. Unadorned and intimate, it carries a quiet clarity that allows emotional weight to step naturally onto the scale. The arrangements orbit it with patience, rarely crowding the lyrics and often allowing instrumental phrases to linger in the air before resolving. Nothing here feels hurried. Each track unfolds at its own pace, inviting the listener into a reflective atmosphere that rewards careful attention.

Lyrically, To Everything a Season represents an important step forward in Doe’s songwriting. The session moves through grief, tenderness, confusion, and small flashes of joy with equal lucidity, rarely resorting to grand declarations. Instead, Doe focuses on the textures of everyday experience, recognizing that the ordinary details of life often carry the deepest resonance. Music has always drawn strength from this transformation of the quotidian into something shared. A passing memory, a moment of doubt, a fleeting instance of grace. In Doe’s hands, these fragments become songs that quietly illuminate the inner life.

From the opening track, “Trembling,” the listener encounters an artist who is attentive to life’s expressive fulcrums. The song acknowledges how closely vulnerability and resilience can coexist, setting the tone for an excursion that treats feeling not as spectacle but as terrain to be navigated thoughtfully. “Two in One” reflects on coincidence and the unexpected alignments that shape our lives, suggesting that certain encounters carry a meaning that extends beyond their immediate circumstances. Rather than dramatizing these moments, Doe observes them with gentle curiosity, finding significance in experiences many might overlook.

Several songs engage directly with themes that resonate across generations. “Loops” confronts the painful realities of dementia, reflecting on the fragile relationship between memory and identity. “Data Points” turns its gaze toward the alienation of the digital age, where the complexity of human experience can feel flattened by metrics and algorithms. In contrast, “Sweetheart” meditates on love grounded firmly in the present moment, focusing on the humility and devotion that sustain lasting connection.

Elsewhere, Doe explores the interplay between uncertainty and conviction. “Hear Me” imagines songwriting as part of a long lineage, suggesting a form of inheritance passed through time. Creation becomes less an act of solitary invention than participation in an ongoing human conversation. Even the album’s lighter passages carry this reflective spirit. “Home” approaches belonging with warmth and subtle humor, while “Joy is a Choice” affirms that happiness often requires deliberate attention and upkeep.

The album concludes with the instrumental “Epilogue,” a brief but poignant farewell that allows the ensemble to speak without words. After the lyrical reflections that precede it, it feels like a quiet exhale. The musicians move together with understated sensitivity, offering a final reminder of how central their collective presence has been to the album’s passionate depth. Throughout To Everything a Season, these players function not as background accompaniment but as attentive collaborators. Each listens closely, shaping the air through small responses and subtle shifts in texture.

What ultimately distinguishes the record is its faith in the communicative power of everyday life. Doe does not attempt to summarize the human condition or offer definitive answers. Instead, he opens a series of small windows onto the involvements that quietly shape us. When gathered into song, they reveal unexpected connections. In listening closely to them, we may find that what seemed private or fleeting is in fact part of a much larger conversation.

Memento: s/t (RJAL 397048)

| Tyran Grillo

Dominique Ané voice, guitars
Sebastien Boisseau double bass
Stephan Oliva piano, Würlitzer
Sacha Toorop drums
Jean-François Mondot texts
Recorded June 26-30, 2023 at La Buissonne Studios by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine and Nina Galuzet
Mixed August 2023 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered at La Buissonne Studios by Nicolas Baillard
Steinway preparation and tuning by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne
Executive produced by Sylvie de Haro
Courtesy of Cinq 7 / Wagram Music
Release date: February 14, 2024

Somewhere between a memory and a melody, this record begins in fog. Not the kind that rolls over a harbor at dawn, but the drifting veil that inhabits the pages of Patrick Modiano, where names distort, streets echo, and time feels less like a line than a dim corridor of half-open doors.

For half a century, Modiano has written variations on the same haunted question: Who were we in the hours that history forgot to record? His novels circle Paris like a compass needle trembling over buried metal. Addresses return. Cafés reappear under new light. A stranger glimpsed on page 20 resurfaces decades later under another name. The past rarely reveals itself directly. It glimmers through rumor, faded notebooks, police files, and the peculiar climate of recollection. In this world, identity resembles a reflection seen in a darkened shop window. One recognizes the shape yet doubts the certainty of the face.

Journalist and jazz critic Jean-François Mondot wandered those corridors for years as a reader. During the strange quiet of the spring of 2020, he attempted something improbable. He asked whether the atmosphere of those novels could be translated into song. Mondot returned to Modiano’s books as though retracing forgotten footsteps through familiar arrondissements. He reread them all, allowing their slow emotional climate to settle around him. From this immersion emerged 13 songs, fragile constellations loosely orbiting the writer’s universe.

The resulting record gradually sketches the arc of a life. A figure appears at its center, elusive and gently refracted. At times he resembles Modiano himself. At other moments he feels closer to the wanderers who drift through the author’s fiction, those solitary witnesses carrying fragments of other people’s stories like loose photographs in their pockets. We follow him through decades as if walking a few steps behind along a damp Parisian sidewalk. First comes the young man, hunched over a notebook in a smoky café where the light seems permanently filtered through nicotine and rain. Later we encounter the lover moving through improbable romances beneath the pale streetlights of the 1960s, a decade that promised freedom yet often delivered only more complicated forms of absence. The years continue their quiet procession. Memory grows fuzzy. Certain streets feel familiar although their names refuse to return. The songs resemble recollections rather than chapters, fragments recovered somewhere between dream and autobiography.

Mondot eventually entrusted these spectral lyrics to Dominique Ané. His voice, flexible and intimate, carries a quality of inward light. Chance played its quiet hand here as well: Ané happens to be a devoted reader of Modiano. And so, the invitation arrived less like a commission than a secret recognition between fellow travelers. Around him gathered musicians whose sensibility gravitates toward the fertile border between silence and sound. Pianist Stephan Oliva and double bassist Sébastien Boisseau bring a subtle gravity to every phrase. Their playing feels conversational, almost confidential. Percussionist Sacha Toorop adds textures that shift shape like clouds moving across a city. The recording itself was guided by Gérard de Haro, whose reputation among musicians rests on an almost mythic sensitivity to tone.

They met at the secluded La Buissonne Studios near Carpentras, a place that seems slightly removed from chronological time. Days passed quietly there while the outside world continued its restless noise. The four musicians recorded the songs live in only a handful of sessions. Breath, wood, and strings carried the fragile architecture of the texts. No attempt was made to polish away the living grain of the performance. One hears fingers on keys, the faint vibration of bass strings, the small hesitations that give language its humanity. What emerges is something rare.

After a brief overture the listener encounters the luminous lift of “Tabarin 1942.” Its gentle ascent joins seamlessly with “Épais brouillard,” together forming a portrait of the artist as a young man who does not yet understand the labyrinth he is entering. These early moments carry a quiet optimism, the sense that the city might still reveal itself. Such brightness proves fleeting. The album soon turns toward more ambiguous territory, presenting Modiano not as a solitary genius but as a voice among voices, often unsure how he will be heard or misheard. In the plaintive “Au pensionnat,” the past presses close like cold glass against the skin. “Café de l’oubli” offers a strangely comforting atmosphere of description, as though certain places exist mainly to shelter forgotten conversations.

Sound design deepens the emotional field without ever overwhelming the words. Ambient touches in songs such as “Fugues” widen the space around the voice. Delicate phrases drift outward like signals sent into the night. One senses that these sonic environments are not decorative additions but spiritual extensions of the narrative. Particularly haunting is the David Lynch-like guitar that haunts “Paris Sixties.” It introduces a shadow beneath the song’s surface celebration of free love. Beneath the dancing silhouettes lies another story, one about disappearance and the quiet corrosion of memory.

Elsewhere the music reveals new facets of the unfolding polyhedron. The arpeggio-laced textures of “Passy 15-20” create a feeling of hesitant movement through unfamiliar districts. “Prières à un bombardier saoul” carries a deeper resonance, its mood suggesting both confession and distant thunder. By the time we reach “La jeune fille à l’étoile,” the voice has adopted a fatigued half-singing that belongs unmistakably to later years. The song seems to lean toward twilight. Every word arrives as if carried across a wide interior distance. Finally comes “Rêve d’Italie,” where the record settles into a luminous elsewhere. It resembles the dream of a coastline glimpsed after a long journey through inland mist. The burdens of life remain somewhere behind the horizon.

Four instrumental interludes anchor the album’s emotional breathing. The balladic piano blues of “Passage des fantômes” opens a corridor through which absent figures seem to pass. “Lignes de fuite” offers a bass solo of quiet beauty. These moments suspend narrative gravity for a time. One hears the spaciousness that Modiano often evokes between paragraphs. Life pauses there. A person may rest inside that pause before continuing onward.

Within the broader landscape of Modiano’s work this project occupies an intriguing position. His novels already possess a musical quality. Translating that rhythm into song reveals another layer of the author’s imagination. The melodies do not illustrate the books. They echo their emotional climate, the sensation of moving through time with incomplete maps.

Listening to this album can feel like wandering through Paris at an hour when the city belongs mostly to ghosts and insomniacs. Streetlights hover above the pavement like small private moons. Somewhere a taxi passes. A café chair scrapes against stone. One realizes that the past has not vanished. It simply occupies another frequency, waiting for the right voice to tune the dial.

Perhaps that is what poetry in song ultimately attempts. It does not reconstruct history with perfect accuracy. Instead, it creates a space where the lost may briefly speak again. A melody touches a sentence. A voice passes through the air. Something forgotten stirs.

Every life leaves behind a constellation of unfinished phrases. Some drift into books. Some hide inside songs. Others remain suspended in silence, awaiting the patience of someone who will listen closely enough to hear what memory itself is trying to say.

Flo and the Murmurs: The Waves (RJAL 397047)

| Tyran Grillo

Marie-Florence Burki voice
Sofia de Falco violin
Paula Hsu viola
Bernadette Köbele cello
Snejana Prodanova double bass
Elodie Théry cello (tracks 1, 6, and 11)
Recorded June 1-3, 2023 at La Buissonne Studios by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mixed by Gérard de Haro at La Buissonne Studios, June 2023
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Artistic direction and production by Gérard de Haro & RJAL
and Marie-Florence Burki for La Buissonne
Release date: January 19, 2024

“Like lightning we look but do not soften…”

Somewhere between the breath of a retreating tide and the thin whistle of wind skimming the shoreline it reveals, Flo and the Murmurs begin a quiet migration. At the tip of its vee is the voice of Marie-Flo Burki, lucid yet ghostlike, suspended inside the trembling architecture of an unconventional string quartet. Around her, violin, viola, cello, and double bass open a corridor where experimental folk, contemporary jazz, and chamber music blur into a neoclassical haze. What begins as landscape becomes bloodstream.

Their debut project, The Waves, borrows its language from Virginia Woolf, though the text feels less quoted than carried. Words move through the ensemble like driftwood in a current. Voice and strings travel through the material like figures surrounded by fog. The instruments do not simply accompany the voice. They answer, interrupt, echo, vanish, and return, assembling a shifting mural of fragile light and quiet melancholy. The music feels at once delicate and luminous. To listen to it is to stand at the edge of dusk, where reflection and depth begin to merge.

Flo and the Murmurs formed in 2020, when Burki began exploring the range of color hidden within the string quartet. Hovering above them is The Waves, Woolf’s meditation on time and interior life. Published in 1931, the novel abandons conventional plot in favor of six braided consciousnesses, each speaking in interior soliloquies that ebb and flow. Between their voices, brief interludes describe the sun traveling across the sea from dawn to dusk. The structure shifts between narrative and atmosphere as light moves, darkness returns, and thought follows the same rhythm.

Water saturates Woolf’s imagination well beyond this single work. In The Voyage Out, the sea carries Rachel Vinrace away from England toward the uncertainties of adulthood. To the Lighthouse centers on the restless waters surrounding the Hebrides, where time erodes the Ramsay household with the quiet persistence of salt. Even Mrs Dalloway, rooted in London’s streets and traffic, carries an undertow of maritime imagery. Clarissa remembers waves breaking along the coast of Bourton, while Septimus passes through hallucination like a body in troubled surf. Woolf’s writing often feels musical, as if a score were hidden between her sentences. Flo and the Murmurs bring that submerged rhythm to the surface. What emerges is less a sequence of songs than a tide of sound advancing and receding, carrying narrative through motion over plot.

“The Sea Has Wrinkles” opens with shaded strings over which spoken words drift with intimate calm. Beginning with recitation dunks the listener directly into Woolf’s ocean, where words retain their grain and breath. When Burki begins to sing in “Come,” melody grows naturally from speech, while speech retains the elasticity of song. Violin lines skim its surface while cello and bass deepen the undertow, the viola gliding between them. A phrase appears, eddies, dissolves, and returns altered.

Some of the album’s most striking moments emerge where Woolf’s imagery of transformation takes hold. In “I Am a Stalk,” consciousness slips into vegetal form. The voice lengthens into stillness while the strings stretch into suspended harmonies. Identity briefly moves beyond the human. Woolf often wrote of such dissolutions into grass, wind, wave, or bird, and Flo and the Murmurs approach them with luminous restraint. “I See, I Hear” gathers sensations with mounting urgency while the strings ripple beneath, layering textures of sight and sound. The effect resembles standing waist-deep in surf, currents arriving from several directions. The listener becomes part of the tide.

Elsewhere, the ensemble draws out quiet intensities. “Water” sparkles with pizzicato droplets, each note falling like rain into an unseen basin. “Our Secret Territory” unfolds through fragile harmonic inflections that hover between fullness and absence. Intimacy resembles a hidden cove, beautiful yet uncertain. In “We Are Creators,” the strings gather strength slowly, forming a current that suggests agency and inevitability. “Beauty Set Flowing” carries a similar tension. Its melody lifts gently, though beneath the brightness lies the sense that beauty itself moves through the world like brine through open hands.

Even the instrumental interlude “The Sun Had Risen” continues the narrative. The strings breathe with quiet radiance, echoing the sunrise passages that punctuate Woolf’s novel. Each note glimmers before dissolving into the next. At last, “The Wave Rises” gathers into a final swell. Shadows soften into light until only a pale gray remains, an estuary where distinctions fade. Burki’s voice moves through this closing space with calm acceptance.

Virginia Woolf once wrote that life is not a series of lamps arranged in symmetry but a luminous halo surrounding us from beginning to end. Whereas thought often seeks stable ground, something firm enough to anchor meaning, water suggests another model. It moves constantly, reshapes stone without force, and gathers separate drops into a single body. Woolf understood that consciousness behaves in much the same way. Flo and the Murmurs allow us to hear it.

One leaves the album with a sensation. A quiet drift. A widening horizon within the mind. Somewhere beneath the noise of daily life, the tide continues its patient breathing. Perhaps our thoughts are only small waves, rising briefly within that immeasurable sea of voices.

Vincent Courtois: Finis Terrae (RJAL 397046)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Courtois cello
Sophie Bernado bassoon
Robin Fincker clarinet, tenor saxophone
Janick Martin accordion
François Merville drums
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at La Buissonne Studios, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded and mixed December 20-21, 2021 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne and La Compagnie de l’imprévu
Release date: April 14, 2023

There are films that tell stories, and there are films that breathe. Finis Terrae belongs to the latter category. In 1929, Jean Epstein carried his camera to Ouessant, a wind-bitten island at the edge of Brittany, and pared narrative to its essentials. Fishermen gather seaweed on a barren rock. One suffers a minor injury. Pride intervenes. Infection spreads. Distance becomes danger. From this slender thread, Epstein draws something tidal and immense. The sea is not a backdrop but a manifestation of temperament. It glitters without warmth and devours without malice. Wind scours faces into maps of endurance, and hands move with tidal patience, thickened by salt and rope.

His lens grazes wool, stone, water, cloud until texture itself becomes drama. Close-ups turn faces into weather systems, while wide shots reduce men to brief notations against immensity. Each frame vibrates with the tension between fragility and expanse. Artifice scarcely intrudes. The men embody versions of themselves, their movements marked by an untrained gravity no actor could counterfeit. What emerges is neither fiction nor reportage but ritual. Time dilates. Waves repeat their ancient syllables against rock. Silence gathers like weather, pressing inward, creating not emptiness but expectancy, as though the image were listening for its own echo.

The wound at the center is modest in scale yet vast in implication. Stubbornness curdles into isolation, and fraternity strains under the weight of pride. When rescue arrives, it feels provisional rather than triumphant, a reminder that survival rests on cooperation as delicate as a boat’s balance in crosscurrent. The title, “End of the Earth,” names a boundary without spectacle, the horizon as threshold. At the brink, stripped of ornament, the human face remains, turned outward, raw as a tide pool exposed at low water. To watch Finis Terrae is to submit to abrasion. Salt seems to gather on the tongue. The wind seeps into the theater. Something erodes and clarifies at once.

Into this charged silence steps Vincent Courtois with a new soundtrack, an act both humble and daring. Writing for a silent film is a conversation across time, a practice of listening not only to what is visible but to what trembles beneath it. Courtois has long possessed a cinematic sensibility, evident in 2017’s Bandes originales, where he composed scores for imagined films and conjured phantom images through sound alone. There, he invented the screen. Here, he answers one already illuminated. The task shifts from discovery to correspondence. What sound belongs to stone, and what rhythm suits a horizon?

Joined by Sophie Bernado on bassoon, Robin Fincker on clarinet and tenor saxophone, Janick Martin on accordion, and François Merville on drums, Courtois approaches the film as interlocutor. The ensemble does not illustrate the images; it converses with them, sometimes in sympathy, sometimes in friction. The “Ouverture” grounds us immediately. Accordion and cello carry a grain that feels quarried from the same rock as the island, earthy yet lucid. Soft drumming enters like distant surf, reeds tracing the contours of labor and air. Sound and image begin to braid, the scrape of bow answering that of seaweed against stone.

In the title track, pizzicato cello pulses with restrained urgency while accordion phrases swell and recede like wind threading through narrow streets. The bassoon casts a dusky sheen across the fishermen’s silhouettes. Music shapes silence rather than filling it, revealing the architecture of quiet already present in the film. “Les Goémons” unfolds in textures that crumble and reform, evoking the uneven shoreline, as clarinet lines rise clear and saline above a gravelly bassoon foundation. The specificity of Ouessant remains palpable, yet the music gestures outward toward any place where humans confront the indifferent sublime.

“L’Impossible Départ” becomes a study in hesitation, sustained tones hovering like mist above water. Even when energy quickens in “Les Volontaires” and “Ouessant,” edging toward dance, a trace of melancholy persists. Celebration carries the memory of peril. Joy stands close to fear. In “L’Attente des Mères,” multiphonic bassoon murmurs and patient drumming create a taut acoustic space in which waiting feels almost visible. “Le Sauvetage” releases unbound tenor lines that surge with collective effort, less victory than will made audible.

The closing “Docteur Lessen” gathers the emotional residue of the journey. A forlorn melody drifts outward, neither resolving nor collapsing, moving toward the horizon without promise of arrival. Notes thin into distance, as though sound itself were subject to erosion, leaving the listener suspended between relief and continuation. Although the film deepens the experience, the soundtrack stands firmly on its own. Freed from the screen, it summons an inner cinema, much as Bandes originales once did, though now the phantoms have faces and weathered hands.

To add a soundtrack to a silent film is to recognize that images are never mute. They hum at frequencies we often overlook, and music can amplify that hum or reveal the solace within it. In the meeting of Epstein’s light and Courtois’s sound, time seems to fold, like two shores sensing one another across water. Perhaps every act of listening is an attempt to stand at such a shore. We face horizons we cannot cross, yet sound travels where the body cannot, binding us to strangers and to landscapes we may never inhabit. At the end of the earth, whether of rock or memory, we remain creatures who lean into the wind, attentive to whatever answers back.

Jean-Marie Machado & Danzas: Cantos Brujos (RJAL 397045)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Karine Sérafin voice
Cécile Grenier viola
Cécile Grassi viola
Guillaume Martigné cello
Élodie Pasquier clarinets
Jean-Charles Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
François Thuillier tuba
Didier Ithursarry accordion
Zé Luis Nascimento percussion
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded September 7-9 and mixed September 21-23, 2022 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne
Release date: February 24, 2023

Pianist Jean-Marie Machado has long dwelled in the fertile borderlands where jazz breathes against classical form and contemporary color stains the page with new light. With his Danzas ensemble, he ventures further into that liminal space on Cantos Brujos, shaping a five-part suite that circles the incandescent heart of Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo. The ballet’s haunted libretto by Gregorio Martínez Sierra, recast here in its French incarnation as L’amour sorcier, becomes less a relic than a living ember. Machado cups it in his hands and blows softly until it flares.

In this reimagining, the Arab-Andalusian and African currents swell like subterranean rivers rising to the surface. Flamenco’s sharper heelwork recedes, not erased but absorbed into a broader choreography of pulse and breath. What once occupied 25 minutes now unfolds across an hour of transformation. The suite becomes a ceremony, an incantation, a circle traced and retraced in ash and salt. Ritual, impressionist haze, and improvisational daring mingle until genre dissolves into atmosphere, a meditation on how memory mutates when sung by new mouths.

The opening gestures are hushed, almost reverent. Piano tones fall like droplets into still water while cello and viola unwind a thread of longing. From this tender aperture emerges “Canción del amor dolido,” a surge of collective breath. Percussion flickers, horns flare, and a soprano saxophone rises in a line so supple it seems to write its own script in the air. The music blooms forth, petal by petal, into “La luna y el misterio” and “En la cueva – La noche,” where shadows acquire texture. Élodie Pasquier’s clarinet in the latter moves with liquid intelligence, slipping between registers as if navigating a dream’s shifting corridors.

Then comes “Danza del terror,” where François Thuillier’s tuba prowls, its voice rich and resonant, joined by a song that feels at once ancient and immediate. Throughout, the ensemble achieves a rare equilibrium. Strength never bruises delicacy. Fragility never forfeits resolve. In “El círculo mágico,” accordion and clarinet entwine like twin serpents guarding an unseen threshold. “Magic love” glints with percussive sparkle and tensile strings, suggesting that enchantment often resides in the smallest vibration.

An atmosphere of mystery pervades the suite, yet it never drifts into abstraction for abstraction’s sake. Even at its most mystical, the music keeps one foot on soil. Many of the pieces are compact, built from cellular motifs that pulse and recombine. The clay drum and flute of “Como llamas” exchange identities with the cajón-driven “Danza ritual del fuego,” carrying us from one temporal plane to another without warning. Just as we settle into the present groove, the ground tilts and we find ourselves elsewhere, suspended between eras. It is here that passion reveals itself most vividly.

Midway through, a solo viola passage opens like a private confession whispered into a cavern. Its timbre holds both bruise and balm. “Canción del fuego fatuo” ignites with sudden joy, a firecracker sparked by a glance that lingers too long. In “Chispas brujas,” Machado converses with cellist Guillaume Martigné in phrases that seem to circle an abyss, daring gravity to claim them. The tension hums. Each note feels like a match struck in darkness.

There is also play. “Danza y canción del juego de amor” struts with buoyant assurance, the full ensemble reveling in its own amplitude. Moods link together like charms on a bracelet, each one catching light from a different angle. Voices rise and recede, tones interlock, and influences weave a tapestry that refuses hierarchy.

All paths lead to “Final – Las campanas del amanecer,” whose orchestral breadth opens the horizon as a diary left unlatched. Dawn arrives with a sound that feels almost architectural, building a world as it erases the last traces of night. The suite closes without sealing itself shut. Instead, it gestures outward, toward a space where the old story has shed its skin and the new one waits, luminous and unclaimed.

When a work rooted in one soil is transplanted and tended by different hands, what grows is neither a replica nor rebellion. It is something in between, something that speaks to the blurriness of identity and the strange fidelity of transformation. Perhaps art’s deepest magic lies there, in its refusal to remain fixed. We listen, thinking we are tracing a lineage, only to realize that lineage is tracing us, inscribing its fire in our own unguarded chambers.

Andy Emler MegaOctet: No Rush! (RJAL 397044)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano, direction
Laurent Blondiau trumpet
Philippe Sellam alto saxophone
Guillaume Orti alto saxophone
Laurent Dehors tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
François Thuillier tuba, saxhorn
François Verly percussion, marimba, tablas
Eric Echampard drums
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Nguyên Lê guitar
Recorded August 30-31, 2021 at La Buissonne Studios by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mixed by Gérard de Haro and Andy Emler at La Buissonne Studios, May 30 to June 1, 2022
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne and La Compagnie aime l’air
Release date: February 3, 2023

No Rush! arrives as the ninth testament from Andy Emler’s MegaOctet. Conceived in the suspended air of the pandemic, the suite took shape while Emler immersed himself in the labyrinthine architectures of 20th-century music. Schönberg’s fractures, Lutosławski’s veiled aleatorics, Ligeti’s shimmering densities, the spectral iridescence of Murail, the volatile lyricism of Cavanna, the tensile drama of Manoury and Ohana all seep into the soil here. One imagines the composer alone with these sounds and his thoughts, listening not for comfort but for provocation, as if each score were a sealed letter slipped under the door. Out of that solitude came eight facets of our collective survival instinct.

“Ouv’ la case” opens with an unveiling. The piano enters as a question breathed into a darkened room, chords suspended in air that seems to inhale with them. Wind instruments murmur as though testing the edges of a new climate. Gradually, the piano’s hesitations gather warmth, focusing light the way a lens courts fire from sunlit dust. The ignition that follows is intimate rather than explosive. The title track unfolds in a stepwise melody, tender as a hand feeling along a wall for a switch. Drummer Eric Echampard and bassist Claude Tchamitchian conjure updrafts that carry François Thuillier’s tuba into buoyant arcs, its low brass made improbably aerodynamic. Trumpeter Laurent Blondiau threads bright filaments through the texture while the piano chisels out a groove of crystalline angles. The ensemble moves like a murmuration that has memorized geometry.

Throughout the record, the music returns to a ritual of emergence: spark, ascent, transformation. François Verly’s percussion animates “Think or sink” with a tactile intelligence, marimba tones falling like polished stones into water, each ripple caught by a quicksilver drums-and-bass exchange. “Just a beginning” leans into its brassy musculature, horns flaring with declarative confidence while Nguyên Lê’s guitar sketches streaks of electricity across the sky. Such solos resemble sudden apertures in the architecture, revealing corridors of thought previously concealed.

Despite the mass of sound available to these virtuosic players, restraint is never far from reach. “Fondamental 6” hovers with the poise of a contemporary chamber suite, its textures diaphanous, its gestures measured as if drawn with a calligrapher’s brush. “Three thoughts for two” begins in hushed tones, a private meditation that slowly finds its pulse, marimba guiding the ensemble into a supple drive. When the groove subsides, Laurent Dehors steps forward on tenor, his lines wandering through nocturnal avenues, lamplight glinting off damp cobblestones of harmony. It is a solo that feels lived in, not merely performed. Even the concise “Minicrobe 2” compresses an ecosystem into two minutes, a microscopic drama teeming with mutations of rhythm and color.

“Good timing” closes the cycle with exuberance that borders on the cosmic. Saxophones blaze, rhythms surge with rocketlike insistence, and the band seems to graze the sun’s perimeter without losing its wit. There is virtuosity here, yes, but also a wink, a murmured “mmm” that suggests satisfaction without self-congratulation.

In an era defined by pause and isolation, Emler fashioned music that refuses haste while never standing still. Perhaps that is the quiet thesis of No Rush! Art does not conquer time, nor does it escape it. Instead, it inhabits time so fully that seconds dilate into landscapes. Listening becomes an act of dwelling. One leaves the album wondering whether urgency is a flaw in our perception rather than a fact of existence and whether, by opening our own hidden cases, we might discover that the richest movements occur when we allow them to unfold at their chosen pace.