TRANSATLANTIC ROOTS - BRUNO ANGELINI TRIO

I remember when I was 11 or 12, I discovered a jazz record in my father's library: ‘Blue moods’ by Miles Davis. I loved this recording, its sensual and mysterious atmosphere, the magnificent sound of Miles’s trumpet mixed with Teddy Charles's vibraphone and quickly it made me want to improvise on the piano and take a closer interest in jazz...

I was then already studying classical music at the conservatory having a preference for the slow movements of French and Russian composers. And so, with this new revelation, one ear in Europe, one in the United States, that's how I lived music much of my teenage years. This double interest was confirmed later when I made the decision to devote myself to the
piano: I then studied jazz at the CIM (Paris) and classical / contemporary music with my mentor Sammy Abenaïm.

Having become a musician and composer, I have the impression of having naturally developed, over the past fifteen years, a more European musical identity, certainly out of a desire to be closer to my deepest roots. During this evolution, I have always maintained a real interest in American culture and especially African-American music.

As a citizen, on the other hand, my thoughts about the United States have lost their enthusiasm due to an awareness of the very negative impact of their foreign policy as well as of their role as leader of a deregulated capitalist world that I hardly appreciate.

And yet ... when I think of Wayne Shorter, John Cage, Mal Waldron, Jeanne Lee, Native American culture, civil rights movements, with Rosa Parks and many others, American ecological movements, with Julia 'Butterfly' Hill and many others, the cinema of David Lynch, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmush ..., in American literature, dance, painting ... my child and adult heart continues to battle hard.

It was by reflecting on my career, its evolution, my contrasting feelings concerning the United States, the fact of valuing their positive aspect, that I wanted to reconnect with my American tropism and to build a repertoire dedicated to my double culture, to my double musical roots, to my "Transatlantic roots".

THE MUSIC

Transatlantic Roots is a continuation of the work of Bruno Angelini that he has developed in recent years over the course of all his projects- Open Land (with Régis Huby, Claude Tchamitchian, Edward Perraud), La Dernière Nuit with Daniel Erdmann, and Sleepless night chronicles (Tore Brunborg, Michele Rabbia, Romain Al'l).

Bruno Angelini's compositions, enlightened by the vast Western written music tradition, develop a personal language in a harmonic universe close to contemporary music.

A meticulous and demanding sound research which he pursues on his own instrument, the piano, of which he exploits all the resonances and beyond, pushing its sonic possibilities with the use of electronics and additional keyboards. This characteristic work on the sound textures of each instrument is central in his compositions, where he explores all the timbral components, the nuances, from the extreme intensity to the infinitely tenuous.

Transatlantic Roots presents a large, open writing, capable of producing physical sensations in a constantly expanding place- A musical space where vital forces are in action, expressed through the use of complementary rhythmic articulations within the orchestra, but where it is also possible to think just of oneself in the world, through the delicacy of contemplation, fantasy and the unhindered imagination of poetry.


Although anchored in European music, Bruno Angelini's music is crossed by African-American idioms, which work as an underlying presence to the musical material. A breath drawn from african-american music, blues, jazz, Funk / P-Funk, Soul, the Amerindian breath, the artistic and societal testimonies of the counter-culture of America through the auteur cinema of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, the civil rights struggle of Rosa Parks, the music of Mal Waldron, Wayne Shorter, Maurice White, the social literature of James Baldwin, John Steinbeck, the ecological movements embodied by Julia 'Butterfly' Hill.

Spirituality, sensuality, trance, inventiveness, minimalism, telluric anchoring, grounding expression of societal and political resistance, American counter culture in general, African-American music in particular, remain for the composer an essential contribution in his field of research and expression.

In the Transatlantic Roots project, Bruno Angelini aims to deepen and exacerbate the tension produced by the friction of these two musical aesthetics, but also to articulate and update their junction points. While remaining attached to the fundamental axes present in his musical discourse, it will nevertheless be revisited, jostled, crossed by these vibrations, this spiritual and protest culture, this rhythmic trance, coming from across the Atlantic.

Who better than the two magnificent artists Fabrice Martinez and Eric Echampard to embody Bruno Angelini's project ? Each with his own references, his personal experiences, is inhabited by this "transatlantic culture". It is this double culture that they will explore together to bring the themes and subjects imagined by Bruno Angelini to life.

With one foot on each continent, who can know where the point of balance between these two major axes of world music will be, for this power trio ?

BRUNO ANGELINI