Troubadours

Album review

Each Sylvain Rifflet album is really thought of as… well, an album. The saxophonist strives to create complete entities, not just a collection of random compositions stuck together. This was evident with Mechanics in 2015 and even more so on ReFocus in 2017, on which he revisited the famous piece Focus by Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter. This time, the title says it all. With Troubadours, Rifflet aims to integrate influences from essentially secular medieval music into modal music with two wind instruments, a drone and some percussion. He drew inspiration from recordings of secular medieval music pieces (often by unknown authors) performed by ensembles such as Alla Francesca (conducted by Brigitte Lesne) and Capella de Ministrers, to get as close as possible to his idea of the troubadours’ music. “I've never made a “modal” record and I wanted to explore this avenue whilst making sure that I avoided the clichés of a saxophonist who explores modal music. In this case, references to Coltrane are quite difficult to avoid. By using a hybrid sound (with modal music and Indian drones), I had wider and more interesting musical possibilities for this project.” A harmonium and a shruti-box are used to create the drone sound. In 2017, Rifflet rediscovered the sounds of Indian music that he had explored with Patrick Moutal at the Conservatoire de Paris. He played with Indian musicians in Mumbai and bought a small shruti-box while in New Delhi. “Since then I’ve been playing them regularly, improvising, and I thought it would be interesting to mix these sounds with those of my instruments, Verneri Pohjola’s trumpet and Benjamin Flament’s percussion. When I found this system that allowed me to operate the sounds with my feet while playing the saxophone, it became obvious that I had found some fantastic poetic sounds to use in this programme based on love poets.” The result is a stunning record that destabilizes classical jazz. This album just goes to confirm that with Sylvain Rifflet, it’s impossible to go around in circles. © Max Dembo/Qobuz