Loin dans les Terres

Among jazz fans, you can have a lot of fun arguing whether “European Jazz” is a useful counterpoint to the American tradition, an original supplement thereto or “is worth less than American jazz on the mar¬ket” as it can be read in a Wikipedia forum. There is no doubt that there have been and are gifted mu¬sicians this side of the Atlantic, who have molded and formed jazz for decades. They have developed very unique playing styles by merging European music traditions with American influences. To give the¬se pioneers of European jazz a stage was the idea for the series of articles “European Jazz Legends”, which has been launched in the magazine Jazz thing in their 100th issue in September 2013. We can now look back on 20 issues. The symbolic stage has now become a real one, and it is in Gutersloh in the middle of Europe. Accompanying each edition of the magazine appearing five times a year, a con¬cert planned especially for this occasion is being organized in cooperation with the label Intuition, the city of Gütersloh and Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln with current protagonists of the series, hosted by our author Götz Bühler. Each concert including an interview with the artist will be broadcast by West¬deutscher Rundfunk (WDR 3) at a later time, and the musical highlights of the concert will be released on a CD.

In other words, five concerts and five CDs in the series “European Jazz Legends” are planned for each year until end of 2017. In addition, a book will be published, in 2018, for which the artic¬le from the magazine will be revised and supplemented, among other things, to provide impressions from the concerts and discussions. The CD of Louis Sclavis is the eleventh publication in the “European Jazz Legends” series. We from Intuition Records are very proud of this and would like to thank all part¬ners and especially the musicians – and hope that you enjoy this series.

„We must not complain, we must fight“, is a motto Louis Sclavis repeats almost like a mantra. The 64 year-old from Lyon likes the process this triggers. The son of a photographer, whose own photographs have been shown in exhibitions and adorn the covers of his newer studio CDs, began playing the clarinet at ten. His inspiration back then was the music of Sidney Bechet, France’s biggest Jazz star at the time. From there he went on to the conservatory, where at sixteen he saw a concert by the Workshop d’Lyon and immediately began playing their sophisticated style of Free Jazz. „You could say that I experienced a very fast transition from New Orleans Jazz and the music of Duke Ellington, which I also liked back then and still like a lot, to Free Jazz“, he laughingly admits. „I only found out later what happened in Jazz musically in between.“ True to his fighting spirit, Sclavis soon engaged himself in the French – and European – Jazz scene with a vigour to match his extraordinary talent, winning the Prix Django Reinhardt in 1988 already and recording many ground breaking albums, such as „Carnet des Routes“, inspired by a tour of Western and central Africa with Henri Texier and Aldo Romano.

The concert documented on this CD opened the WDR 3 Jazzfest at the Theater Gütersloh on February 2, 2017, which also happened to be Louis Sclavis’ 64th birthday. As a present to himself and to his audience, he presented a new quartet that evening, with Sylvain Rifflet, who more than stepped up to the plate as the second reed-voice on saxophone, the excellent Christophe Lavergne on drums and Sarah Murcia on bass. Sclavis adores this eclectic group and explains that especially Sarah Murcia, best known in France for accompanying chansonnier George Moustaki or writing the score to a successful movie about Serge Gainsbourg, brings a different flair and freshness to the music. „I like drummers and bassplayers, but they just did not appear on any of my last albums“, he says. „So I was very happy to be playing with a real „Jazz rhythm section“ again in Gütersloh.“