Samy Thiébault - Symphonic Tales (2019)

Unconscious, fiery, visionary, or all three at once? It has not been a year since Caribbean Stories, and Samy Thiébault is already back on the front with a completely crazy symphonic project on paper. This "Coltranian", decidedly, is a pure "star-eater", to quote one of the beautiful titles of Caribbean Stories, and we understand better, after the fact, this quote from a Persian poet he had put in Rebirth 's exergue, published in 2016: "Find what you want to be in yourself because you are everything.

This "everything" in question - and that, we hear it as soon as the opening of Symphonic Tales as the volume, the excess and the slopes in cinemascope of what is played are already shivering our speakers - this time looks like a deliverance. The previous opus, him, was of the catharsis. At the mercy of Caribbean wanderings full of suns and tenderness, Samy Thiébault was unlearned. Perhaps it was necessary, indeed, to break its own codes to respect at best the deep soul of this music, or to melt them like ice cubes in a dancing cocktail of calypso, merengue and chachacha.

This challenge will have paradoxically revived an old dream. "After recapturing slowness, I was ripe for the orchestra," says the saxophonist-flutist who had already tried to write a symphony while he was finishing his musical studies in the class of jazz of the CNSM (National Conservatory of Music) of Paris. At the time, it absorbs everything: John Coltrane, who remains his living god, but also the scholarly music of the early 20th century. The day and the night ? Not really. The great names of modal jazz, as we know, have similarly watered the triad Ravel-Debussy-Fauré, which triad was not no more insensitive to traditional modal music … and especially to Indian rhythms.

Coltrane also loved them, the famous Indian ragas that Ravi Shankar popularized. Samy Thiébault is also impregnated (just like Jim Morrison which he paid homage in A Feast Of Friends …), and not only musically. He even flirted, for a time, with tantrism, this form of meditation connecting trance, enjoyment and the divine. Thus operates the spiritual signage of this Symphonic Tales, not so much on an exotic mode (despite the nod to the Calcutta Cutie of Horace Silver at the beginning of Elevation …) that as a basis of composition.

An equally ambitious bet at the orchestration level. "It must have been an integral part of a nervous swing," says Samy Thiébault, and especially not designed as accompaniment. It is the Orchester Symphonique de Bretagne which takes up the challenge with a young conductor, Aurélien Azan Zielinski, who, two years ago, directed two works by Omar Sosa. The accomplished prowess is also very much in the hands of Philippe Teissier Du Cros, the microsetter who works miracles when confronted by strong musical personalities, while Sébastien Vidal wins as the true alter ego of the saxophonist when it comes to pruning sometimes dense partitions while highlighting their melodic line.

No fulfillment, in any case, without fidelity. To implement such a project, Samy Thiébault wanted to find the group put in parentheses at the time of Caribbean Stories. These are his fundamentals. Their names are Adrien Chicot, Sylvain Romano and Philippe Soirat, plus the tabla player Mosin Kawa, decisive in the choice of compositions. For this type of business, the battery is the hotspot. It must be neither bulky nor evanescent. The subtle and elegant drive of Philippe Soirat wins the piece, in alloy with the rhythmical precision that Sylvain Romano testifies to the double bass. Between these two masses that are the orchestra and the rhythmic, the piano part is more complex. Adrien Chicot sticks to it with dexterity, supporting precise parts of strings or wood, or else counterpointing the brass with chords in quarters that would not have denied a certain McCoy Tyner. His groove and sensitivity take on more brilliance in the solos offered by some songs.

TRACKLIST

1. The Flame
2. Elévation
3. Diva and Shiva
4. Jahân Jog Joy
5. Adana
6. Ajurna
7. Diwali



All thanks go to the original releaser