MP85

Album Description

Like it says on the tin: Michel Portal is 85! But time has never managed to curb the desires and the creative madness of this artist who guards a no man's land between jazz, contemporary music and everything else. Portal has always prized unexpected or unlikely encounters. Blurring the lines. Magnifying the differences. Building on the margins. After ten years of discographic silence (Baïlador dates from 2011), the clarinettist embarks here his band with the cast of fire (Bojan Z on piano and keyboards, Nils Wogram on trombone and Bruno Chevillon on double bass) in an explosive improvisation which was inspired by the backdrop of the pandemic.

"This record was made under very special conditions, after two long months of lockdown. I and the members of my new quintet found ourselves in the studios of Label Bleu, eager for music but with mixed feeling of joy, fear of the virus and involuntary distrust of others, who were suddenly relegated to the status of "threatening strangers". As if it were a matter of each of us re-establishing the right distances from the world and from each other, music was created in the present tense over these few days of recording, by moving it between one another with a true collective intensity. It is this fundamental movement of opening up that, I believe, gives the music on this record its colour and direction – like a gradual return to life. What we have all sought here together was a way of re-finding the élan and carefree spirit of playing music, the simple joy of sharing something vivid and explosive in the moment: this faculty that music possesses, when we take it sufficiently seriously and with a light-enough heart, of breaking down all the walls between us!"

Walls which can also be borders. MP85 erases them and moves from Africa (African Wind) to Armenia (Armenia) to the Basque Country (Euskal Kantua). The music is so tightly-made that we can close our eyes and follow the artists around the world in 50 minutes. Whether the improvisation is tinged with a certain melancholy (Armenia) or whether it's more lively, (Jazzoulie), Michel Portal's gang makes one forget the pandemic's deadening interruption. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz