I have never been a fan of two piano albums – there are exceptions the chief being An Evening with Herbie Hancock & Chick Corea: In Concert. And now this live album recorded as long ago as 2009 at the Olympia in Paris and released in May joins such a list. I’m just catching up on it now. This duo are French jazz stars whose lineage is from the Caribbean, from Guadeloupe and Martinique. On the recording they explore styles like biguine, jazz and Creole traditions. I’ve heard Canonge in London in Courtney Pine’s band circa House of Legends and he was a charismatic presence playing a style called zouk within the Courtney sound. As for Jean-Marie whom I haven’t heard live check out the recent Tony Tixier album Poems Never End where Tixier covers some of his work very appropriately.
Highlights of Con Alma include a tender version of ‘Ana Maria,’ the Wayne Shorter classic from his mid-1970s album Native Dancer. And covering Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Con Alma’ the title track in this case is always a good idea. It is suavely executed by the pair and interpreted a step away from the usual more Afro-Cuban type treatments that I know.
The album overall effortlessly makes meaningful links between the Caribbean and progressive American jazz. There’s a lightness of touch the two are so good at cultivating. Trust me you will be going back into the back catalogues of both these fine players to find out more when you hear such a charming piece as ‘Lydie et Eric’ which was on A-JM’s Biguine Reflections II in the 1990s and was later collected and issued with other material into a significant corpus of work.
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