La Buissonne

Bruno Angelini: Nearly nothing, almost everything (RJAL 397043)

| Tyran Grillo

Bruno Angelini piano
Régis Huby violin, tenor violin, electronics
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Edward Perraud drums, percussion
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded June 7-9, 2021 and mixed May 2022 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne label & by Solange
Release date: October 28, 2022

Pianist Bruno Angelini’s Open Land Quartet is aptly named, though the phrase suggests not only geography but grammar. An open land is also an open page, a field upon which signs may be set down, erased, rewritten. The ensemble he shares with violinist Régis Huby, bassist Claude Tchamitchian, and drummer Edward Perraud does not simply spread outward into panoramic space. It inscribes that space with listening. One senses a text to be breathed in, line by line.

For this recording, the band turns toward minimalist poets such as Ada Mondès, William Carlos Williams, Chandak Chattarji, Lydia Vadkerti-Gavornikova, and Jacob Nibénegesabe. Their words become seeds rather than scripts. Angelini does not set poems to music so much as he releases music from them. Each track feels like a margin where ink has thinned and tone has taken over. The allusive and airy qualities of those writers are distilled here into a language that is both tactile and fugitive.

Immersed in the opening “Soul wanderings,” one encounters a poetry prior to utterance. The arco bass moves like a sentence being tested for truth. The piano ripples in aqueous figures that refract rather than declare. Cymbals swell with the patience of an ellipsis. Huby’s bow sings in a register that suggests both lament and invocation. Before a single quoted line can appear, the quartet has already composed an argument in timbre. The music refuses the label of minimalism, though it honors economy. Beneath its lucid surface lies a dense weave, enriched by rubato currents and rhythmic signatures that fold into one another. Different speeds coexist, braided into a living syntax. The result resembles a polyglot conversation in which no voice dominates, yet each retains its accent.

Angelini describes these pieces as rooted in a harmonic language shaped by contemporary practice, sometimes free in pulse, sometimes bound to intricate meters, favoring simultaneity of motion. The quartet merits the term “orchestra” by sheer sensibility of color and architectural ambition. As the third chapter in their journey for La Buissonne, this album deepens the soil of their earlier statements while extending new tendrils into the unknown.

“Peaceful warrior” traverses arid terrain, footsteps echoing through an interior canyon. Notes fall like sparse punctuation, each one weighted with intention. “At dawn” introduces a folk inflection that glows. Its lyricism carries the memory of communal song without succumbing to nostalgia. “Present time” and “Wild wanderings” pivot toward groove, yet their propulsion resists simple forward motion. The rhythm section interlocks with tensile grace, generating momentum that circles back upon itself. Every gesture is examined from multiple angles, as though the band were parsing a complex stanza. Huby’s violin in “Wild wanderings” weaves a dense canopy above the pulse, omnipresent and searching, while the ensemble moves through it like readers tracing a labyrinthine paragraph.

At the album’s core stands “Paterson,” a three-part suite whose title nods to Williams and his epic meditation on place and perception. Here, improvisation becomes a form of reading. The musicians approach the material as one might approach a palimpsest, attentive to what lies beneath the visible surface. Huby’s electronics extend the acoustic frame, introducing a digital aura that neither eclipses nor embellishes but refracts. Enthusiasm forms the suite’s spine, yet its musculature is supple, responsive to each fleeting impulse.

Throughout the album, Angelini operates at a porous border between jazz and contemporary music. He draws from the ethos of jazz, its risk and relational listening, while embracing the structural daring and harmonic ambiguity of modern composition. The quartet inhabits this intersection as if it were a natural habitat. Their music is neither hybrid nor compromise. It is a terrain where swing converses with spectral harmony, where counterpoint brushes against groove, where abstraction courts melody without irony. In this open land, genre becomes a provisional map that dissolves once the journey begins.

And so, when words inspire music that in turn transcends words, what remains of authorship? Perhaps art is less about translation than about transmutation. A poem enters the ear as language and exits as vibration. A melody enters as vibration and exits as memory. Between these states lies a space we cannot fully name. Angelini and his companions dwell there, inviting us to consider that meaning may not reside in what is said or played, but in the attentive signals that gather around it.

Jean-Charles Richard/Marc Copland: L’étoffe des rêves (RJAL 397042)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Charles Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
Marc Copland piano
Claudia Solal vocals
Vincent Segal cello
Recorded and mixed in January 2022 by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label and Jean Charles Richard
Release date: June 22, 2022

L’étoffe des rêves (The fabric of dreams) emerged from saxophonist Jean-Charles Richard’s quiet longing to enter into conversation with pianist Marc Copland. From that desire, almost courtly in its patience, the project gathered breath. With the addition of cellist Vincent Segal and vocalist Claudia Solal, the album assumes the shape of a suspended tapestry, light as silk yet weighted with centuries of memory. It is a gathering of hours rather than songs, of climates rather than compositions. Each piece gestures toward Richard’s devotion to literature and to a lineage of sound that includes Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Messiaen, yet never lingers in quotation. Instead, these presences are dissolved and distilled, transformed into timbre and touch, as if books and scores had been steeped in water until only their perfume remained.

“Feodor” begins in the low murmur of pizzicato and baritone saxophone, a dialogue between plucked string and breath that feels almost subterranean. The melody unfurls with a nocturnal radiance, flowering like a vine that blooms while we sleep. There is gravity here, yet it does not weigh upon the listener. It hovers, alert and watchful, as though a character from Dostoevsky had stepped from the page and found himself translated into resonance. The saxophone carries the density of a novel in its tone, its phrases circling moral abysses without falling in.

In “Giverny,” Copland’s piano becomes a garden of harmonics, petals opening beneath Richard’s soprano lines. Their vocabularies interlace without rivalry. The soprano glides in slender arcs while the piano refracts light, offering chords that seem to shimmer at their edges. One hears water, lilies, reflections breaking into abstraction. Richard’s virtuosity is neither exhibition nor display. It is a form of listening, a willingness to be altered by the piano’s spectral hues. The result feels less like improvisation and more like a shared act of painting, color seeping into color until distinctions dissolve.

Solal enters “Ophelia’s death” with a voice that seems spun from dusk. Her phrasing sways between lucidity and surrender, weaving hope with despair in a single filament. The music cradles her words without cushioning their sorrow. The melody drifts through shadows, then briefly catches a shaft of light, as if the river itself has paused to remember the sky. In “Ophélie,” now filtered through Rimbaud, Shakespeare’s heroine is not merely revived but reimagined. Piano and pizzicato cello sparkle around her like broken glass catching sunlight. The setting suggests a chamber opera stripped to its essence, drama reduced to breath, to syllable, to pulse.

“Russian Prince” opens with a soprano solo that arcs across silence in a single unbroken gesture. The piano enters as though it had been waiting in the wings of thought. A motif crystallizes from nothing, coherent from its first utterance, like a child who speaks in complete sentences before learning to walk. The title invites speculation. One might sense the echo of The Idiot, that fragile prince of compassion navigating a brutal world. Whether or not this allusion is intended matters less than the atmosphere it conjures. The music inhabits innocence without naivety, vulnerability without collapse.

Several pieces function as brief, luminous asides. “La lettre d’Isaac Babel” pairs baritone and cello in a duet that feels like correspondence across eras. The lines are spare, intimate, as though written in ink that fades even as it dries. “Light flight,” a solo for pizzicato cello, flickers past like a thought one cannot quite hold. These interludes resemble marginalia in a well-loved book, annotations that reveal as much as the main text.

The spiritual inflection of “O sacrum convivium” introduces an ambient expanse that seems to suspend time itself. Sound stretches thin, nearly transparent, yet remains charged with presence. The spoken word of the title track deepens the sense that we are overhearing rather than consuming. Each piece feels severed from its origin and reborn in vibration. Literature becomes airflow. Painting becomes a chord. Prayer becomes resonance. In this transmutation, the album achieves a rare paradox, steeped in reference while remaining wholly itself.

The closing “Weeping brook” leaves a lone baritone saxophone tracing a solitary line. It does not plead for witness. It simply exists, like water moving over stone in a forest no one has mapped. Listening becomes a private act, almost clandestine. We are less audience than eavesdropper, privy to a conversation between memory and sound.

What remains is not a catalogue of inspirations but the sensation of having stood at a threshold. Words lose their consonants and reappear as breath. Images relinquish their outlines and return as vibration. In that exchange lies a question that extends beyond this album. If stories can be sung and paintings can be heard, perhaps the boundaries we draw between forms are merely habits of perception. Perhaps meaning itself is migratory, moving from page to air to silence, asking only that we follow with attentive hearts.

Emler/Tchamitchian/Echampard: The Useful Report (RJAL 397041)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Eric Echampard drums
Recorded and mixed by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastering by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway Grand Piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne Label and La Compagnie aime l’air
Release date: February 11, 2022

Pianist Andy Emler, bassist Claude Tchamitchian, and drummer Erich Echampard have spent more than two decades metabolizing one another’s instincts. What began as chemistry has ripened into something cellular. On this fourth recording, the self-styled “ETE” trio’s interplay feels less like conversation and more like respiration, an exchange of oxygen at the most intimate scale. They have turned toward composition with renewed devotion, shaping motifs that behave like strands of genetic code, spiraling through each piece and replicating in altered forms. The album’s title gestures toward our cultural fixation on surfaces, yet the trio answers with a plunge inward. They seek the mitochondrion rather than the mirror, the quiet engine rather than the polished facade. In doing so, they make a case for music as adenosine triphosphate, as stored light released into motion.

The phrase “polyphonic monologue” used by Raphaëlle Tchamitchian in the album’s liner notes proves uncannily apt. There are no solos in the traditional sense, no heroic cell stepping forward to claim dominion. Instead, the trio behaves as a single entity whose organs hum in cooperative tension. Each instrument pulses with a distinct timbre, yet the borders blur. The piano becomes membrane and marrow, the bass a bloodstream carrying harmonic iron, the drums a lattice of nerves firing in luminous arcs. Their unity is not homogeneity but interdependence. What one initiates, another transforms. What one relinquishes, another absorbs.

“The document” opens like a petri dish held to morning light. The bass stirs first, delicate yet intent, as if sketching the faint outline of a living form. Emler’s piano enters with subterranean warmth, rolling chords that feel like tectonic plates shifting beneath tender growth. Echampard’s cymbals shimmer into being, droplets of metallic rain, while the drums provide a pulse that suggests both heart and forge. The music gathers itself without coercion. It rises as a flame rises, by virtue of its own chemistry. The introduction is not merely dynamic but parthenogenetic.

With “The real,” urgency courses through the ensemble like an electric current seeking ground. The trio advances in braided momentum, their phrases leaning into one another, pressing toward articulation. Meaning here is discovered in the act of motion, finding a curious echo in “The fake,” where simplicity becomes revelation. Tchamitchian’s bass groove stands unadorned, almost austere, and from that clarity the others extract veins of shimmering ore. Piano figures glint as mica under sunlight. Drums trace fine filigree patterns across the muscular frame. The sculpture they erect is vast, yet its strength derives from the plainness of its foundation. Authenticity and artifice entwine, indistinguishable at the molecular level.

Even in pieces that tilt toward improvisational exposure, such as “The lies” and the two-part “Indecisions,” the trio’s commitment to structure remains palpable. Motifs are recurring dreams that are altered slightly with each iteration. Beneath the surface, one senses the flex of sinew and tendon. These are not aimless wanderings. They are the disciplined contractions of a body testing its limits. The music quivers with potential energy, poised between restraint and eruption.

Brief reflections like “The worries” function as synaptic flashes, concise yet charged. Broader statements such as “The resistant” and “The endless hopelude” unfold with a grandeur that invites the listener to nod in recognition. Through it all, the trio breathes as one. There is no arrhythmia, no faltering in the shared pulse. Their cohesion feels inevitable, as if they have tapped into a circulatory system older than themselves. By the time “No return” arrives, the listener has been carried through cycles of exertion and release. Fatigue sets in, yet it is the satisfying kind of muscles well used, of energy fully spent in meaningful labor. The closing passage offers repose, a moment when the organism settles into equilibrium.

What lingers after the final resonance fades is not merely admiration for technical prowess or compositional craft. One is left contemplating the strange fact that life depends on ceaseless transformation. Cells die so others may thrive. Energy dissipates even as it sustains. This trio reminds us that depth is not a static reservoir but a process, a burning at the core that cannot be seen directly yet animates every gesture. Perhaps authenticity lies not in the surface or the hidden interior, but in the flow between them. In that current, we recognize ourselves as both fragile and inexhaustible, flickers of stored sunlight seeking form in the dark.

Bill Carrothers/Vincent Courtois: Firebirds (RJAL 397040)

| Tyran Grillo

Bill Carrothers piano
Vincent Courtois cello
Eric Séva baritone saxophone on tracks 6 and 7
Recording, mixing, and mastering at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded May 21 and mixed June 21, 2021, by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Steinway grand piano tuned by Alain Massonneau
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard
Produced and directed by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: November 12, 2021

Firebirds is many things, but above all, an act of faith. Gérard de Haro, long a quiet architect of improbable encounters in his La Buissonne studio, had carried within him the intuition that pianist Bill Carrothers and cellist Vincent Courtois belonged in the same current. Each had left an imprint on the room’s air in separate sessions, as if their sounds were tributaries waiting for confluence. Yet they had never tested the tensile strength of their voices against one another. Courtois has confessed that without de Haro’s conviction, the meeting might have remained hypothetical. Trust became the catalyst. Trust in the ear behind the glass, trust in the unseen geometry of chance. What followed feels less like a collaboration than a tide answering the pull of a distant moon.

Indeed, despite the album’s title, it is water that courses through it by temperament. The frame is Egberto Gismonti’s “Aqua y Vinho,” placed at the threshold and the farewell. The cello begins alone, tracing the melody as though drafting a map across an empty sea. Its lines appear rectilinear at first, crystalline and deliberate, then soften, bending into arcs that suggest eddies and hidden inlets. When the piano joins, it does not so much accompany as set the shoreline in motion. Its chords fall with the measured cadence of footsteps along wet sand, insistent yet patient. Courtois responds with widening spirals of sound, ascending in vaporous abstraction before returning, each time altered, to the melody’s wellspring. The repetition never repeats. It accumulates.

The improvised title track arrived first in the studio, though it appears later in sequence, as if the musicians wished to let it steep before offering it whole. The title track smolders with a folk-inflected sorrow, embers glowing beneath a veil of restraint. Carrothers coaxes from the piano a warmth that suggests hearthlight flickering on stone walls. Courtois answers with phrases that hover between lament and lullaby, a bowed murmur that seems to remember something older than language. Their interplay suggests two elements seeking equilibrium, flame reflected on water, each transfiguring the other’s hue.

Standards such as “Deep Night” and “Isfahan” are treated as living aquifers. “Isfahan” opens into a spacious dusk, the arrival of guest musician Eric Séva’s baritone saxophone deepening the horizon. His tone spreads like ink in water, dark yet translucent, amplifying the nocturnal hush that permeates the record. The trio does not crowd the melody; they breathe around it, allowing space to function as tidepool and threshold. “Deep Night” shimmers with restraint, its contours revealed slowly, as if the musicians were polishing a stone discovered at low tide.

Even Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” undergoes a gentle metamorphosis. Pizzicato cello skips like pebbles across a pond while the piano lays down chords that ripple outward in concentric rings. The familiar refrain acquires a different gravity here, less nostalgic than reflective, as though time were not a wheel but a river whose surface records every passing cloud.

The original compositions widen the estuary. “Colleville-sur-Mer” unfolds in a hush that feels tidal, grief receding and returning with unbidden regularity. “San Andrea” keens with a salt-etched intensity, its phrases cresting in plaintive arcs. “The Icebird” introduces a glacial clarity, tones refracted as if through frozen air, while “1852 mètres plus tard” paints in gradients of altitude and atmosphere, suggesting ascent through thinning light. Throughout, de Haro’s production captures not only the notes but the air between them, that charged interval where sound prepares to become something else.

To speak of transfiguration here is not mere embellishment. The album enacts it. Themes dissolve and reassemble, melodies shift from solid ground to liquid shimmer, textures ignite and cool. Each musician remains unmistakably himself, yet the encounter alters their outlines. The music seems to ask whether identity is ever fixed or always in the process of becoming, shaped by the streams it consents to enter. Perhaps art works similarly, eroding certainty, polishing rough edges, carving new channels in the bedrock of perception. If so, the true transfiguration may occur not within the notes themselves but within the listener, who steps into those same streams and discovers, upon emerging, that the shoreline has shifted.

Vincent Lê Quang: Everlasting (RJAL 397038)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Lê Quang saxophones
Bruno Ruder piano
John Quitzke drums
Guido Zorn double bass
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded December 2019 and Mixed February 2020 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne label
Release date: May 21, 2021

Everlasting announces the leader debut of Vincent Lê Quang with a quiet assurance that feels anything but declarative. There is no display of ego here, no virtuosic flourish meant to dazzle. Instead, the album reveals a rarer mastery that effaces itself in service of listening. Lê Quang’s soprano and tenor do not dominate the space so much as inhabit it, breathing alongside pianist Bruno Ruder, drummer John Quitzke, and bassist Guido Zorn in a shared atmosphere where composition and improvisation dissolve into one another. What emerges is a music that seems already ancient, yet continually being born in the present.

This clarity of purpose stems from 12 years of collective life, the quartet bound by a mutual attentiveness that allows each piece to function as a portal to a clearer understanding of the self. Lê Quang speaks of his compositions as keys to a common state, and that metaphor becomes audible across the record. Each track opens a different interior landscape, yet all are connected by a shared commitment to the risk of being fully together in sound. Gérard de Haro’s production deepens this sense of communion, letting the music breathe within the luminous acoustics of Studios La Buissonne, where every resonance carries memory and every silence feels charged with possibility.

The album begins with an environment. In “L’odeur du buis,” piano and drums murmur from beneath the surface while the soprano rises gently into the night air, suspended above an arco bass that glows with lunar patience. Rather than announcing a theme, the piece slowly gathers a climate, a scent of darkness, foliage, and open sky. From this opening terrain, “La fugueuse” moves forward with subtle propulsion, water passing over unseen stones, the band drifting deeper into a current that neither rushes nor rests. These two tracks form a single act of arrival, a descent into the world the album will inhabit.

From there, the music shifts toward flowering and fracture. “Fleur” reveals some of the band’s most delicate interplay, cymbals shimmering with glasslike detail while Zorn’s bass traces a folk-tinged modal path. The group moves as one organism, loose at the edges yet inseparable at the core. This sense of collective breath reaches its most expansive form in “Everlasting,” a ballad built on tremor. Quitzke’s drumming hints at subterranean movement while piano, bass, and reed hold to a semblance of order, a belief that time can be counted. Gradually, that belief unravels. Flow becomes the governing principle of a rising density that never tips into excess, only into gravity.

A quieter inward turn follows. “Novembre” unfolds with the slowness of a season retracting into itself. This introspection deepens in “Une danse pour Wayne,” which refuses dance in favor of drift. Piano and drums speak in a near-telepathic dialogue, light touching darkness and returning transformed. Lê Quang’s soprano hovers above them, trembling with life yet strangely disembodied. Where these pieces search inward, “À rebours” stretches alone, a piano tendon extending between bone and air, longing without consolation.

The album then tilts toward the uncanny. “Dans la boîte à clous tous les clous sont tordus” begins with a solitary soprano that slowly gathers companions, the music assembling itself piece by piece. Tension accumulates, an electric expectancy that never resolves into release, and the listener is left suspended between dread and wonder. That unsettled feeling grows in “Le rêve d’une île,” a land that appears solid only to shift beneath the feet, and in “Rayon violet,” where breath rides atop shimmering harmonics, drawing a luminous arc through darkness.

With “Unaccounted-for pasts,” Lê Quang moves to tenor and opens a deeper register of uncertainty. The sound becomes cavernous, filled with echoes of memory that cannot be named. The album touches collective anxiety without ever becoming rhetorical, transforming fear into a shared vibration that binds the quartet more tightly together.

“Everlast” arrives not as a conclusion but as a threshold. The music hovers at the edge of sleep, brushing the listener with a tenderness that feels neither like a farewell nor a promise, simply a moment of contact. Consciousness thins, time loosens, and the sounds hover between presence and disappearance.

What this music ultimately gives is a space held in common, a quiet breathing room where listening becomes a form of companionship. Everlasting suggests a practice of attention that carries us beyond our habitual divisions of past and present, self and other, motion and stillness. In that quiet recognition lies its lasting power, an invitation to inhabit the space between knowing and listening, where meaning reveals itself on its own time.

Jeremy Lirola: Mock the Borders (RJAL 397036)

| Tyran Grillo

Jeremy Lirola double bass
Denis Guivarc’h alto saxophone
Maxime Sanchez piano, keyboards
Nicolas Larmignat drums
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded and mixed in June 2021 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Alain Massonneau
Produced by La Poulie Production & Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: October 8, 2021

On the heels of 2016’s Uptown Desire, Jeremy Lirola steps beyond the grid of New York City and into a wider, less mapped territory, exchanging subway tunnels for constellations. The shift feels less like a change of scenery than a recalibration of conscience. Lirola is listening deeper, sketching a music that resists the gravitational pull of imitation. Building on the spirit of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, he cultivates individuality with the patience of someone tending rare seeds in a storm-blown garden. Creativity here becomes a quiet counterforce to a world that profits from sameness, speed, and surveillance, a reminder that difference can be a form of justice. Joined by alto saxophonist Denis Guivarc’h, pianist Maxime Sanchez, and drummer Nicolas Larmignat, Lirola assembles not just a band but a small republic of attentiveness, each member accountable to the others and to the air they share. Together they construct music that feels open as a plaza yet grounded like a hearth, spacious enough to wander and steady enough to return to.

The album opens with “Mock the Lines,” a room freshly burnished for arrival, its shine inviting reflection without vanity. The track feels both ceremonial and intimate, as though the listener is being asked to shed shoes and preconceptions. From this polished threshold, the group glides into “Living Symbols,” where groove sits in a warm pocket that is physical, spiritual, and conspiratorial all at once. Sanchez’s keyboards spread color like slow daylight across a floor, while Guivarc’h’s alto illuminates hidden corners. The quartet flows naturally into “Danced Border,” a piece that toys with the very idea of boundaries. Sanchez’s pianism ripples with curiosity over a rhythm that knows how to sway without surrendering its footing. The melodic convergence at the end is a sly reminder that lines are made to be questioned, crossed, and occasionally turned into song.

At this point, the record begins to behave like a set of ethical parables told in sound, sometimes laconic, sometimes luxuriant, always purposeful. “Sensitive Border” leads seamlessly into the expansive “Ghost Dance,” where Lirola’s bass takes on the role of a traveling griot with stories tucked into every string. The latter track hovers between what is seen and what is whispered. Keyboards shimmer like memory about to become myth, while alto moves like a shadow figure, keeping careful watch on every phrase. Rather than a detour, this stretch feels like the album’s moral heart, a meditation on how history lingers, how wounds speak, and how music might listen back.

Midway through, the record blooms into a four-part chain of color impressions. “Red” arrives as glittering dawn, full of resolve without aggression. “Black” follows like an echoing supernova, vast, humming, and strangely tender in its immensity. “White” drifts in as a partial eclipse, bright but uncertain, clarity touched by doubt, while “Yellow” closes the sequence in a twinkling dream that refuses to wake too quickly. Taken together, these pieces suggest that resistance to darkness is never one shade but many, a spectrum of feeling that glows differently at every hour.

The album then gathers itself for its final movement. “Essai éternel” arrives like a love letter that slowly turns into a ritual, affection melting into collective motion, devotion disguised as dance. It is both intimate and communal, a groove that feels like care made audible. From there, “Mock the End Lines” eases the listener toward silence with graceful tact, buttering the bread of finality just enough so that the meal feels complete without overfeeding the moment.

What we are left with is not a protest but a gentle reimagining of how the world might sound if kindness were taken seriously. Lirola offers no sermons, only evidence that beauty can nudge brutality aside, that listening can be a form of courage, and that music can rehearse the habits of a more humane future.

Jean-Marie Machado: Majakka (RJAL 397039)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Keyvan Chemirani zarb, percussion
Jean-Charles Richard saxophones, flutes
Vincent Segal cello
Recording, mixing, mastering Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded September 23-25, 2020, and mixed by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studios
Piano preparation and tuning by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile, Gérard de Haro with RJAL for La Buissonne
Release date: February 5, 2021

On Majakka, a word that in Finnish means lighthouse yet also suggests an inner watchtower, pianist and composer Jean-Marie Machado establishes a roaming state of mind. The album feels like a journey that refuses checkpoints, a music that travels because it knows nothing else. It charts the migration of memory, the drift of identity, and the strange geography of listening itself.

Throughout, Machado speaks of looking back at his own past recordings and discovering a color that had been waiting for him all along, a private illumination that insisted on being seen. That realization becomes the emotional compass of the album. Majakka is less a retrospective than a return that keeps going forward, a circular voyage where the act of remembering becomes another form of departure.

Surrounded by a remarkable ensemble, he shapes this odyssey with great subtlety. Keyvan Chemirani’s zarb (or tombak), a heartbeat of wood and skin, brings a tactile, breathing pulse. Jean-Charles Richard’s saxophones and flutes cut lines through the air like invisible routes, while Vincent Segal’s cello adds gravity, warmth, and a kind of traveling shadow beneath the light. Together they constitute a terrain that is constantly shifting, constantly unfolding.

Born into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese lineages and raised in Morocco, Machado carries a passport made of histories rather than nations. His affinity for Brazilian music and for the impressionistic expanses of Manuel de Falla and others is his natural climate.

“Bolinha” opens with a sound that feels newly discovered even as it seems traditional. The zarb skims the surface of the music, giving gentle traction to the piano, bass, and saxophone as though the rhythm were lightly tugging the travelers onward. Beneath the beauty lies a quiet insistence, a pulse that suggests inward as much as outward motion. One senses that this journey begins by turning inside before it ever reaches the horizon.

In “Um vento leve,” the wind grows brighter, but longing deepens. Piano and soprano sax converse with tenderness while the rhythm section moves with guarded wisdom, keeping secrets until the landscape demands them. The music carries an ache for destinations that may not exist except in the act of seeking.

Both pieces belong to La main des saisons, a project inspired by Fernando Pessoa, whose poetry itself is a labyrinth of wandering selves. Later, “Emoção de alegria” returns to this spirit, dancing sideways rather than straight ahead. It refuses linear passage, opting instead for meandering revelation. The joy here is full of shadows.

“La lune dans la lumière” pauses the expedition. Cello and low flute circle the piano in a nocturnal embrace, creating a sound at once intimate and distant. The moonlight seems to hover rather than shine, illuminating sorrow without dissolving it. For a moment, travel becomes stillness, and stillness becomes its own destination.

“Gallop impulse,” first heard on Machado’s 2018 Gallop Songs, arrives like a sudden clearing after nightfall. Born from his connection with Chemirani, and colored by Machado’s earlier collaboration with Naná Vasconcelos, the piece blooms into immediate life. Percussion slips in and out of view, shaping the space around it.

The trio of pieces written for the quartet in the studio, “Les pierres noires,” “Outra Terra,” and “La mer des pluies,” carries the tremor of a pandemic-afflicted world. They feel carved from isolation, shaped by a time when itineracy felt forbidden. Yet within that restriction, Machado finds expansive imagination. The latter piece, a solo piano ballad, stands apart like a private confession. Its beauty is spare, unadorned, and devastating. It tells a wordless story of hunger for air, light, and meaning beyond the body’s limits.

“Les yeux de Tangati,” originally conceived for a duet with Dave Liebman, brings the journey back to earth and breath. Wooden flute (perhaps a nay?) and soprano saxophone weave across an imagined desert, while piano and pizzicato cello plant delicate footprints in the sand. A conversation with landscape itself, as though the dunes were speaking back. Finally, “Slow bird” lifts the listener into quiet enchantment, moving with restrained grace before opening into a surging release.

By the end, travel no longer feels like crossing from here to there. It becomes a way of being. Machado’s lighthouse does not guide ships to land but teaches them how to drift with purpose. The album suggests that borders are simply habits of hearing, lines we draw because we are afraid of the open.

And so, Majakka proposes a gentler philosophy. To journey is not to arrive, to belong is not to stay, and to remember is not to return but to keep moving with deeper awareness. The true horizon is not a place but a practice, the quiet art of listening while in motion, forever and without frontiers.

Andy Emler: No Solo (RJAL 397035)

| Tyran Grillo

Naïssam Jalal flute, voice
Aïda Nosrat voice
Rhoda Scott voice
Thomas de Pourquery voice
Phil Reptil sound design
Ballaké Sissoko kora
Aminata “Nakou” Drame voice
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Géraldine Laurent alto saxophone
Hervé Fontaine beat box 
Ngûyen Lê electric guitar 
Andy Emler piano 
Recorded live and mixed at Studio La Buissonne on February 7/8, 2019, by Gérard de Haro
Steinway D piano preparation and tuning by Alain Massonneau
All guests were recorded at Studios Sextan – La Fonderie Malakoff by Vincent Mahey and Arthur Gouret
except Nguyên Lê, Thomas de Pourquery, and Phil Reptil, who overdubbed from home
Mixed by Gérard de Haro and Andy Emler
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label and Andy Emler
Release date: August 28, 2020

After a sequence of musical journeys ranging from the boldly orchestral to the hushed and introspective, Andy Emler arrives at a revealing new vantage point with No Solo. The title gestures toward a meditation on relation in which individuality becomes clearer precisely by being placed in conversation with others. Surrounded by collaborators who span generations, geographies, and aesthetic traditions, Emler constructs an expansive portrait of an artist continually navigating the blur between solitude and collectivity. From the very first notes, the music suggests that borders are never fixed lines but shifting membranes through which feeling, history, and sound continually pass.

Such tensions are announced with gentle irony in the opening moments. “Jingle tails” and “The warm up” begin as solo piano excursions, yet their isolation never feels enclosed. The playing seems already attuned to voices yet to arrive in anticipation of dialogue. The pieces balance a soft, melancholic edge with a dense sense of nostalgia, revealing Emler’s gift for emotional acuity and storytelling without artifice. As they unfold, the textures grow more panoramic and suggestive, evoking the quiet brilliance of winter light alongside the promise hidden within its stillness. Instead of lingering in recollection, the pianist moves through memory with the velocity of rewound time, allowing fragments to flicker past while granting each moment enough space to resonate. From this inward world, the music gradually opens outward, preparing the listener for a widening field of encounter.

That expansion becomes tangible in “For nobody,” where Naïssam Jalal appears first as breath rather than melody. Her flute and voice hover in sibilant, almost vaporous gestures before coalescing into drifting lines that feel both fragile and insistent. What begins as liminality slowly gathers gravity, and her presence reads less as accompaniment than as an elemental force shaping the atmosphere itself. Her timbres stand vividly in the foreground, sculpting a climate of unresolved yearning, a feeling that carries directly into “Gold timer,” where vocalists Aïda Nosrat and Rhoda Scott usher the listener into more populous territory. Spoken reflections on togetherness surface amid the harmonies, imagining a world beyond division while quietly questioning whether such separation was ever absolute. Here, Emler’s writing probes the idea that music might precede political or cultural borders, operating as a language that connects before it categorizes.

That inquiry deepens further in “Light please,” which inhabits a distinctly mystical register. Phil Reptil’s ethereal sound design and Thomas de Pourquery’s falsetto suspend time in a luminous haze, allowing the music to drift through slow currents of call and response. Voices feel scattered across invisible distances, suggesting that connection is less an achievement than a condition already written into the air. This sense of movement finds a different, more earthly expression in “12 Oysters in the lake,” an enchanting meeting of Ballaké Sissoko’s kora and Aminata “Nakou” Drame’s voice. The narrative takes shape organically, intertwining images of shared labor, mutual care, and the rhythms of the land. The kora glimmers with radiant delicacy while Drame sings with an urgency that feels both grounded and transcendent, as if addressing not only listeners but the very environment that sustains them in an act of sonic reciprocity.

“Près de son nom” shifts the perspective toward darker, more resonant depths. Claude Tchamitchian’s arco bass sketches a sequence of sonorous shapes that accumulate weight and gravity, as though the ground beneath the music were slowly giving way to ocean. The sound swells, thickens, and finally seems absorbed by an imagined vastness, suggesting how personal expression can dissolve into something larger without losing its essence. From this submerged state emerges “The rise of the sad groove,” a piece that feels as if dawn were breaking after a long night. Géraldine Laurent’s alto saxophone breathes with quiet optimism, offering tender phrases that transmit feeling without explanation. Just as the mood appears ready to drift, beat boxer Hervé Fontaine introduces a grounded rhythmic pulse, his deep bass anchoring the flight and demonstrating that momentum and vulnerability can coexist.

In closing, “You’re so special” arrives as a generous ballad illuminated by Ngûyen Lê’s singing electric guitar. Its lyricism soars yet remains warm, drawing together the strands of connection that have threaded through the entire work. Taken as a whole, No Solo reveals how distinctions can coexist within a shared space, allowing identities to overlap without dissolving into sameness. The music does not simply end but recedes toward a quiet horizon, where breaths, strings, and distant echoes continue to shimmer just beyond hearing, as if the lines between here and elsewhere were slowly loosening in a gentle, unbounded glow.

Pascale Berthelot: Saison Sècrete (RJAL 397037)

| Tyran Grillo

Pascale Berthelot
Saison Secrète

Pascale Berthelot piano
Recorded November 29, 2018
Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Alain Massonneau
Release date: October 26, 2020

Pianist Pascale Berthelot, a remarkable interpreter of (and favorite among) living composers, becomes one herself—in a sense—throughout this program of five extended improvisations. Liberated at the behest of Gérard de Haro, engineer and head of Studios La Buissonne in France, these unabashedly visual evocations of in-the-moment imaginings constitute one of the most multidimensional piano recordings I’ve heard in years. While its impressionism lays its head as much on the shoulder of Poulenc as Jarrett, it shapes itself one body part at a time without the ultimate need for such comparative garments. Regardless of the lines of reckoning we might connect from Earth to its distant galaxy, it validates the listener’s imagination, and in that spirit I offer mine in return.

“Balance des étoiles” opens the curtains as if in expectation of morning but instead finds the moon masquerading as the sun, rising in mimicry of dawn. The toes become restless for the feel of soil between them, the heart for a lamp to light the way. What began as a reverie ends as a descent into ocean, where prose and poetry comingle until the difference is impossible to make out. In “Ciel s’illune,” the sky and earth are flipped, so that another distinction—that between inhalation and exhalation—is rendered mythological. When we at last get to the center of this genetic spiral, “Nuits, chères” abandons the lie of tranquility for the truth of its unsettling, thus evoking the bliss and deeper love that a relationship conflict can yield. Even in “Chambre sans langage,” in which the intonations of dampened piano strings resound like a knock at the door, spiritual tendencies move beyond prayer into communion. And so, when the dream of “Clair éclat de l’M” lights a ponderous candle with its tongue, it adds one last link to the chain we’ve been extending all along, dragging behind us a memory box whose contents we have already forgotten.

And yet, we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that the world Berthelot describes existed before these utterances. Rather, we experience it as she does, unfolding in real time at the touch of flesh and key until something inevitable arises. Thus, the recording itself is a song made up by a child lost in the woods, holding on to lullabies as the only answers to her questions of fear and emerging all the stronger for it.