The science of Kenny Barron and Alain Jean-Marie at Jazz à la Villette

Grand piano evening, Friday September 2, at the Philharmonie de Paris (grande salle Pierre-Boulez): first part, Alain Jean-Marie and Diego Imbert (double bass) in their scintillating dialogue Interplay, The Music of Bill Evans (Trebim Music, 2020). The album was a resounding success. Second part, Kenny Barron, Dave Holland & Johnathan Blake Trio, whose last album, Without Disappointment (Dare2 Records, 2020) well deserves its title.

Jazz remaining a music of science, conscience and exchanges, “the most popular of learned music, the most learned of popular music”, according to critic André Francis, one can only shudder at such a poster. In the two names of pianists Alain Jean-Marie and Kenny Barron, their two bass partners, Diego Imbert and the master Dave Holland, we know in advance that they share precise knowledge, demanding as much as unlimited, but above all , in the sense that André Bazin had proposed it for the cinematograph, a “morality of the game”.

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That’s what we were saying the other night, August 26 in the Drôme, when we discovered the superb pianist Lorraine Desmarais, born in Montreal in 1956, who came from Quebec for the first time in “the old country”. Discovery due to the tireless Alain Brunet, trumpeter and senior civil servant, co-founder of the very feminine festival Jazz Scent. Why ? What do we think about while listening?

Program dedicated to Bill Evans

There are objective reasons: Lorraine Desmarais declined, with aplomb, enthusiasm and joy to play a program devoted to the illustrious Bill Evans (1929-1980), god of modern pianists and intangible memory for those who heard him on stage. It is without excess of surprise that we will discover, along the way, that Lorraine Desmarais will have, very young, perfected her playing – jazz cannot be learned, it is transmitted –, in New York, with Kenny Barron.

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Bill Evans, Kenny Barron, Jazz à la Villette fast approaching, it’s more than a sign. We know that Alain Jean-Marie and Kenny Barron must share the stage. Together, in the role of “sideman”, the jazz dictionary scrolls by. No need to expect some jousting from a distance. No rivalry, no race for virtuosity, that’s not the kind. No, an exact science, in this case, that of improvisation. Common point between Alain Jean-Marie, born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1945, and Kenny Barron, born in Philadelphia in 1943, their respect for the piano, history and music.

It is the young Diego Imbert, born in Paris in 1966, the most requested of double bassists, now a leader bursting with initiatives, who offers Alain Jean-Marie, in 2019, to tackle a repertoire composed by Bill Evans. Who, we know his mastery equal to his humility, begins by declining: “ Alain saw Bill Evans as a mountain, explains Diego Imbert. Finally convinced, he arrived at rehearsals with scrupulous recordings of Bill Evans’ choruses, with “voicings” and rhythmic details… However, what I proposed to him was to play together as we are. For my part, I was not going to venture to imitate Eddie Gomez, Scott LaFaro, or whatever… We would play compositions known to all in Bill Evans’ versions, but rarely covered : Waltz for Debby, Nardis, Turn Out the Stars, The Two Lonely People…” Hey! All four on the Lorraine Desmarais program at Les Trois Châteaux…

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