Cohen – Ribot: a pair of exceptional slaps to close the jazz section of the Radio France Festival!

Greg Lewis, Joe Dyson, Marc Ribot : trois musiciens totalement investis dans l’exploration d’un soul-jazz quintessentiel… et démentiel ! J.BE

The jazz section of the Nouveau Festival Radio France closed on Tuesday evening at the Agora theater in Montpellier, with nearly three hours of free music of truly intense intensity and beauty. mind-blowing. First, the Telavian trumpeter Avishai Cohen with a complex and sublime set, haunted by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then the New York guitarist for a master class of crazy and enjoyable soul-jazz interactions.

Upside down and inside out! Initially, Marc Ribot & the Jazz-Bins was to open the last evening of the jazz section of the Nouveau Festival Radio France, Tuesday at the Agora theater in Montpellier, and Avishai Cohen's quartet to close it. But the Hammond organ is a sensitive animal that hardly enjoys moving around: faced with the hassle of tuning it, the organization had to resolve to reverse the order of passage. And the public was even more amazed.

This is how Avishai Cohen did not wait for night to plunge us into the darkness of his mood. Supported by three remarkable musicians whom he has known for a long time, or even longer (Yonathan Avishai on piano, Barak Mori on double bass and Ziv Ravitz on drums), the Telavian trumpeter began with a magnificent and labyrinthine composition , as written on the folds of a vellum curtain: we would have to be able to stretch it to perceive its continuity, as it stands we lose ourselves in the contemplation of its cryptic beauty. Will I die, miss ? Will I die ?, that's her title. It appears on the album Cross my palm with silver (2017). Avishai Cohen says that he composed it in homage to the Syrian people gassed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad (the attack on Ghouta which did more of 1,400 deaths in 2013 Editor's note).

A "suite" haunted by the Israeli-Palestinian war

The trumpeter explains in fact that his quartet will then perform a new work, and to this day unheard: Ashes to gold, a "suite" written last November, at his home in Israel, a few weeks after the terrible events of October 7 and therefore during the no less horrible days which followed and were similar until today. Upset by the dead, the sacrificed, the kidnapped, exhausted by the generalization of a black or white vision of a much more complicated situation, he responds as an artist. By a work. "For the end of suffering. For the war to cease. A silence.

Performed in one go, Ashes to gold is a complicated and tormented work. On the drums, Ziv Ravitz plays in tachycardia, the heart which races here, which collapses there, and which leaves, broken, crumbled, painful, enraged. The piano of Yonathan Avishai, often associated, in contrast, with the trumpet of Avishai Cohen, works on atonality, dissonance, harmonic anguish, melodic aspiration, l’ contemporary abstraction. Barak Mori's double bass seeks to add binder, softness, but is also at times overcome by emotion, turns cello into a deeper, so much deeper  hellip; And the trumpet to hold back, before shouting its rage or, filtered by a wah-wah pedal associated with delay, sobbing in great boils of stubborn notes.

Ashes to goldcarries all the emotions of its performers with regard to what theirs (who are also ours) are still experiencing: frustrations, fears, anger, sorrows, worries, compassion, hopes… If it is not easy, if it is demanding, almost unkind in its stubborn refusal of melodic prettiness and its desire to explore the rhythmic and harmonic avant-gardes, it bears witness to a humanity that refuses despite everything to abandon itself to entropy, and through its many wounds, lets through a beauty and a light, so much greater than the ugliness and darkness of the moment. And it is absolutely heartbreaking… A silence.

A soul jazz punk master class

A change of set later and a change of mood later, here is Marc Ribot & the Jazz-Bins. In the garden, Greg Lewis, brute of the Hammond organ (associated with his Leslie cabin which literally seems to breathe behind him) which he plays without shoes, in multicolored socks. At court, Marc Ribot, seated, even curled up on his guitar (a Godin, a Guild, difficult to tell from our place, in any case half a vintage electric drum), his feet on his numerous pedals ;effects. They face each other for optimal musical interactions. So much the worse for the visibility of the guitarist, in profile throughout the concert, the “bad profile”, the left, the one who hides his hands! We got the message, it suits us: the master came to play, not show off. Finally, between the two masters, a kid, Joe Dyson, a virtuoso drummer from New Orleans.

Marc Ribot who remembered having accompanied in 1979 for four months on tour in Europe but also in the "chitlin' circuit" (sadness of a segregationist country where the black American public has its own peripheral circuit), "Brother" Jack McDuff, luminary of soul-jazz organ, gospel-inspired and deeply associated with African-American culture. With his two accomplices, he returns to this territory, not to appropriate it but to show his admiration and love. In his way. Crazy and awesome.

Whether they take on a flexibility of soul jazz, a calvacade of bebop, a jazz ballad or a harmolodic oddity, the treatment is equally breathtaking. The theme circulates between the organ which never stops drooling with joy and the guitar which articulates learned and/or delirious speeches, while the drums maintain the affair at a level reasonably struck groove.

Their version of James Brown’s haunting masterpiece, Ain’t it funky now,is demonic: the trio installs the gimmick, excites the groove, stretches it to the extreme… hellip; and delays the explosion again and again. When the hair lid on our coffee makers is about to blow off, they drop everything. First Greg Lewis who shows us that the super instrument invented by Laurens Hammond to support Christian fervor, can very well be put at the service of the most libidinous demons, and it is indeed enjoyable. Then Marc Ribot who begins by articulating beautifully executed sentences à la Wes Montgmery, then launches into a logorrhea with increasingly screamed and flared articulation, until the crisis of free punk madness supersaturated jazz. The foot, full of splinters, but the foot! Had the song lasted the entire set, we wouldn't have found anything to complain about…hellip; at the same time, we would have lost our minds, so what we would then have…

Nice, our three devils intersperse long up-tempo pieces that turn crazy and long calm pieces… going crazy too but, well, less dangerously. When they hit the blues, we remember (even if we haven't forgotten) what the most beautifully dented pieces of Tom Waits and the most spiritual reveries of John Zorn owe to the game loose, surfed, articulated by Marc Ribot. When this artist improvises down tempo on his six-string, it’s pure reverberated poetry… But it's not a question of pushing the cliché, the gentleman remains a rebel of the avant-garde: even when the affair turns gospel, that the The organ goes into churchy mode, its guitar plays the dyspraxic and aphasic possessed. We love. Gently once again, the trio brings it back, without bringing it back, twisting a pair of cubist funk which endanger the fingers and ankles of Greg Lewis, the toms and cymbals of Joe Dyson, and what can we say about the guitar by Marc Ribot ? It seemed to us that after an hour and twenty minutes, she couldn't take it anymore… We ? We want more !

Recorded by France Musique, this double happiness will be broadcast on its antenna on Saturday August 10 at 8 p.m.