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On Everlasting, Vincent Lê Quang offers to our ears his broad palette as a composer and the richness of his saxophone playing. For this first record as a leader after years of working with Daniel Humair or Henri Texier and notable collaborations with Jeanne Added or Vincent Peirani, Lê Quang signs a deep and crepuscular work.
If music fortunately takes on a secret meaning for each listener, it is the idea of urgency confronted with what we believe to be eternal that guided Vincent Lê Quang in his conception of Everlasting. Just as the constantly renewed ink brings the engraving back to life, the living matter of the quartet's sounds reawakens musical structures from a remote, recent or dreamed past...
Trained at the CNSM in Paris, where today he teaches generative improvisation, Lê Quang is very early noticed by Daniel Humair with whom he makes several recordings. In 2003, he caused a sensation at the Concours national de jazz de la Défense, where he won the prizes for best soloist and best group (for his duo with Vincent Peirani). He also collaborates with Riccardo Del Fra and Aldo Romano and is a member of Henri Texier's quintet.
In 2011, he signed a trio with the singer Jeanne Added, and the pianist Bruno Ruder, yes is a pleasant country – mainly based on poems by Cummings, Yeats and Celan - . He was also nominated at the Victoires du Jazz and got an award by the Académie Charles Cros.
He carries on exploring and affirming a poetic jazz with this first album as a leader, surrounded by the faithful Bruno Ruder (piano),Joe Quitzke (drums) and Guido Zorn (bass).
"The quartet has been playing for a dozen years," Vincent Lê Quang points out, "The music that takes place here can only blossom with these four people, notably through our mutual understanding and common desire to reconcile writing and real-time invention that is improvisation. The repertoire forms a kind of backbone that we use to write music in the present - each composition is a key that allows us to dive ourselves in a common state, with one requirement however: to be well connected.
Recorded in February 2020 at La Buissonne, from an extensive common repertoire, Everlasting benefited from the precious help of the producer and sound engineer Gérard de Haro. "Once we got together in the studio, we quickly felt the need to focus on breath and space," Lê Quang recalls. "With Gérard, we're dealing with an artist; he has a vision, knows how to guide us and helps us get things out".
«La Buissonne studio is the place where I feel that my instrument sounds the way I want it to sound," Lê Quang adds, "the equipment is always ready for what I want to do, I find a form of comfort that is really precious. Even before plugging in the slightest microphone, the room has an unexplainable vibration”.
"It's been a long time since we've heard such an inhabited, penetrating soprano sax in France", as we could read in Jazzman magazine at the beginning of his career. Although he has devoted himself for a long time only to the soprano, particularly under the influence of Steve Lacy whose concerts are still vivid in his memory ("where I felt something I am looking for: the music being the sound itself”) Vincent Lê Quang has recently taken up the tenor saxophone.
"I felt that this quartet, in particular, was calling me into a sound that I didn't have with the soprano alone. I felt like playing on the soprano-tenor ambiguity, inspired by Garbarek, for whom both instruments are continuous", he explains.
Lament of a dreamed Orient, Mitteleuropa harmonies, swing of a chosen America: If jazz is a crossbreeding, it sounds on Everlasting with the improbable accents that bathe the composer's universe of Vincent Lê Quang.
It is the shock of urgency facing the upheavals of all that man thought eternal that has fuelled the conception of Everlasting, as well as a loving glance for music of the past, which emerges, here behind a medieval melisma, there in the vocal style of a ballad. Through a fluid music, sometimes of a rare incandescence, Vincent Lê Quang, Joe Quitzke, Bruno Ruder and Guido Zorn invite us to travel. But far from a series of postcards coming from dead shores, we are invited to a mysterious Whole. Inner music, from the space within, as Henri Michaux would say, which seeks the eternal novelty of emotion through the forest of sounds.
"Vincent Lê Quang is totally committed to music, and yet musical verve does not stifle his thoughts. It is of an undeniable density(…) The cohesion of the group forces admiration(...) an open, non-descriptive music, with a very strong evocative power".
Xavier Prevost, Jazz Magazine
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