“Égarés” are wanderers or people who have gone astray. Kora player Ballaké Sissoko, for example, is Malian musical royalty, but has spent many years making records with French cellist Vincent Segal that bring together Manding and European chamber traditions. Meanwhile, Émile Parisien and Vincent Peirani have worked together as a saxophone and accordion duo somewhere in the hinterlands of jazz and folk.
In new album Les Égarés, the four men combine and recombine in multiple combinations. Parisien’s alto takes the lead, with Segal’s cello underpinning his airy cadenzas with solid-earthen weight, or else kora and accordion pirouette around each other.
The album’s cover is a watercolour of the four musicians seated in a forest clearing, as if enjoying a safe-for-work “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”. The music has an appropriate gentle impressionism, but it also has the art movement’s openness to other cultures, a sense that many breezes blow. Label No Format invokes the spirits of Don Cherry and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, but this is a lot less restless: a closer comparison would be the dappled Mediterranean dialogues of Anouar Brahem’s Le Pas Du Chat Noir.
Les Égarés is topped and tailed with two ancient kora tunes, “Ta Nyé” and “Banja”. In each case the melody is introduced by sax, cello and accordion and then taken over and deepened by Sissoko. Of the new compositions, all of which sound both improvised and as if their melodies have been known since the dawn of time, the folk-tinged “Dou” is a highlight.
A version of Marc Perrone’s “Esperanza” is turned into gossamer-light cumbia: where the traditional Colombian examples of the genre have the steady drive of an Andean steam train, this one sets sax breathy as a flute dancing around bubbling accordion and kora with the rhythmic flourishes of a cuatro. A cover of Joe Zawinul’s “Orient Express” has fast buzzing cello in place of percussion, and Parisien’s tightrope-walking is more like Wayne Shorter than the original’s Bobby Malach.
★★★★☆
‘Les Égarés’ is released by No Format
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