Emile Parisien

Michael Wollny with Emile Parisien, Tim Lefebvre & Christian Lillinger – XXXX (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 5, 2023 · Comments off

The beasts are loose! At the end of 2019, just a few months before the curtain fell over the world, pianist Michael Wollny (who has gone electric for this album), saxophonist Émile Parisien, bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Christian Lillinger all entered the A-Trane club in Berlin with no set-list and no roadmap. Over the course of eight sets, these four fascinating, crazy, contemporary jazz scientists conversed, provoked, fought, embraced, and entwined. What they created here was electro, krautrock, free, progressive – it was more than simply jazz. The sound defies classification, and maybe it’s better that way. With the help of producer Jason Kingsland, who mainly deals in rock productions (Kaiser Chiefs, Band of Horses, Belle and Sebastian), they turned almost eight hours of live recording into 45 minutes of studio material. The result is a fascinating experience. Naturally, XXXX is rather less accessible than Sidney Bechet’s Petite fleur. But the listener can’t help but be carried away by the generosity of these wild exchanges and the energy of the four musicians who never fall into the trap of a complacent, inward-looking jam. Sensitive souls steer clear! Curious souls, get stuck in! – Marc Zisman

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Emile Parisien & Roberto Negro – Les Métanuits (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · July 3, 2023 · Comments off

Tribute to the 100th birthday of the composer György Ligeti. 11 improvisations by Emile Parisien (soprano saxophone) and Robert Negro (piano), inspired by the String Quartet No. 1 “Métamorphoses Nocturnes”.

Ligeti appreciated improvisation in jazz, but rejected it within his compositions. Accordingly, Parisien and Negro proceeded respectfully: “The original motifs, moods and colors always flash out. Harmonically, we expanded them with our ideas,” explains Negro. In their Ligeti homage, they do not dwell on historicizing conventions of an old abstract avant-garde, but let beguilingly current, stirringly concrete music resound.

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Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Segal, Emile Parisien, Vincent Peirani – Les Égarés (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 19, 2023 · Comments off

New quartet Sissoko Segal Parisien Peirani presents “Les Égarés” (The wandering), an album recorded by two virtuoso duos (Sissoko-Segal and Peirani-Parisien), who for years have excelled in the art of cross-fertilising sounds and transcending genres.

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Jan Lundgren, Emile Parisien, Lars Danielsson – Into the Night (Live) (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · April 9, 2023 · Comments off

Jan Lundgren, Emile Parisien, Lars Danielsson - Into the Night (Live) (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download

The trio format has always been something of an ideal for Jan Lundgren. That particular buzz when communication between the musicians in a trio is direct, immediate and ever-present…when the trio keeps a constant sense of forward motion and development…when the players collectively remain open to the inspiration of every millisecond. These are the virtues which Lundgren sees as the recipe for the kind of openness, freedom, subtlety and excellence of a trio at its best.
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Emile Parisien with Joachim Kühn – Sfumato (2016) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · January 9, 2023 · Comments off

The French jazz scene has a vitality, an originality and a do-it- all and do-it-anyway mentality about it right now. It is French musicians who are blazing the new trails for contemporary European jazz. There is a wonderful open-mindedness towards all musical cultures, genres and tendencies; and yet French musicians also give off the sense of having a proper grounding in their own tradition. A musician who represents all of these tendencies ‘par excellence’ is saxophonist Emile Parisien. Born in Cahors in the wine-growing region of the Lot, he is a jazz visionary. He may have one foot in that ancient soil, but his gaze is firmly fixed on the future. The leading French newspaper Le Monde has called him “the best new thing that has happened in European jazz for a long time,” while the Hamburg radio station NDR made the point of telling its listeners to give Parisien their “undivided attention.”

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Emile Parisien – Sfumato Live in Marciac (2018) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · January 9, 2023 · Comments off

Parisien’s “Sfumato” concert at Jazz in Marciac on 8 August 2017 was unforgettable and has been captured for ever on HighResAudio. His quintet was augmented at this concert by illustrious guests: US trumpet star Wynton Marsalis, French jazz legend Michel Portal and Parisien’s alter ego and long-established duo partner Vincent Peirani. Multi-layered, innovative and experimental, “Sfumato live in Marciac” is packed full of tension, excitement and turbulence. And yet is firmly grounded in jazz, brimming over with playfulness and adventures of improvisation; it is a testament to the intensity and to the magic of live jazz.

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Emile Parisien, Vincent Peirani, Andreas Schaerer, Michael Wollny – Out Of Land (Live) (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/48kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · January 9, 2023 · Comments off

For once, here’s a band for which the word “supergroup” is completely appropriate. Swiss vocalist Andreas Schaerer, German pianist Michael Wollny, French accordionist Vincent Peirani and his saxophonist compatriot Emile Parisien are four of the brightest and most charismatic stars in European jazz, now combining their talents in a quartet. This live 2016 recording demonstrates why they are at the very pinnacle of jazz musicians of their generation.

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Emile Parisien – Chien Guêpe (2012/2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · January 9, 2023 · Comments off

The Dadaist provocation of the cover, announcing dog but showing cat, speaks volumes about the quartet’s musical aesthetics: if humour is one of their ways of standing back, it is not the only one. The group assume head-on the tragical and operatic accents of the themes that pass through Dieu m’a brossé les dents (God has brushed my teeth): dirges and dying voices. But from the first notes of the introduction, where the zither duplicates and bypasses the remote ringing of the piano, the drama takes on a layer of fantasy. Sitting on the edge of the mirror, we are surrounded by roaming ghosts and floating shadows. By freeing the themes from their gravity, this aesthetic choice defuses a pathos that is close at regular intervals. Paradoxically, it is when they use an extensive palette of processes, similar to cards endlessly shuffled and dealt, that the quartet reach a refined expression. The thousand shades of tones and colours contrast all the more that the piece’s structure is simple. Dieu m’a brossé les dents is a journey, an epic, with its rich movements, its breaks, its seismic rumblings, its telluric eruptions. In its climaxes, the piece rediscovers the origin of free jazz: a cry of pain against the injustice of the world. But the combustion of energy that makes the piece work carries its own exhaustion. In the ostinato that follows the catastrophe, the bells ring again and the deity of the title, ridiculous of course, can but helplessly contemplate that devastated scene. Barely good enough to make the enamel shine… So the quartet remorselessly turn their back on it and hop to a completely different atmosphere.

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Emile Parisien – Louise (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · January 8, 2023 · Comments off

Emile Parisien - Louise (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download

“The best new thing that has happened in European jazz for a long time” (Le Monde), Emile Parisien has formed a top-flight American-European sextet for this album, his seventh as leader or co-leader on ACT. The band will be touring in 2022, the year which also marks the tenth anniversary of Parisien’s first appearance on an ACT album.
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Vincent Peirani, Emile Parisien – Belle Époque (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 25, 2022 · Comments off

France’s new jazz stars join forces in a multifaceted chamber-jazz duo paying tribute to the grand jazz and folk music history of their home country and transporting it into here and now.

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Vincent Peirani & Emile Parisien – Abrazo (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 25, 2022 · Comments off

Abrazo. Embrace. A close dance perhaps, but also with the hint of a friendly tussle. Could there be a more fitting metaphor for the duo of accordionist Vincent Peirani and soprano saxophonist Émile Parisien? “It’s like a marriage,” says Peirani. “In the beginning everything’s just great, wonderful, paradise. But of course, after a while, it also becomes challenging, which is quite normal. “Right now, we’re just massively happy playing together.” There can be very few musicians who have got to know each other as well as Peirani and Parisien have. They have clocked up well over 1000 concerts together in the past decade, of which more than 600 have been as a duo. They first met in 2012 as members of drummer Daniel Humair’s quartet, and their very first appearance as a duo was an impromptu late-night club set while touring in Korea. “Une ca-ta-strophe! An unmitigated disaster”… Peirani still remembers it vividly. But shortly later, with the benefit of no jet-lag, and also having done some proper preparation, things did fall properly into place at a festival in France, and one of the outstanding line-ups in European jazz was born. In 2014 their first duo album “Belle Epoque” was released on ACT. From then on they started touring, and were soon playing at the leading clubs and festivals in France and Germany and setting off all over the world – to Asia, Latin America, the USA, Canada and throughout Europe. And also appearing in major classical venues such as the Philharmonie halls in Berlin, Hamburg, Essen and the Musikverein in Vienna. And it was not long before international recognition became established, through prizes such as the Echo Jazz, Les Victoires du Jazz, the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, and numerous awards and ‘best-of’ lists from leading jazz magazines.

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