French trumpet accordion duo albums aren’t the product of 52nd Street. They don’t belong in a box assembled from a manual by a phalanx of self appointed taste terminators.
There aren’t many of these.
Neither are French but I turn to the interplay between Dave Douglas and Guy Klucevsek (1947–2025) for some sort of precedence or failing that approximation of context on an album within a comparable idiom like Charms of the Night Sky (Winter & Winter, 1998) on which these are contained.
Douglas’ essential trumpet style is not at all the same however – he likes cup mutes more and bluesy smears too – and neither was Klucevsek’s approach to accordion the same whose style sat more closely to Gil Goldstein’s eg on a track like (with Bob Mintzer) the very appealing ‘Two To Tango‘. Suarez’ sound is closer to Richard Galliano’s.
But without at all raining on anyone’s parade least of all the excellent Suarez’, state of the art progressive jazz accordion in Europe anyway (anywhere?) is dominated by the remarkable Vincent Peirani. I’m not being literal but fact.
If more of a hot trad loving type go for incroyable Franco-American collaborations in the trumpet-accordion jazz domain look no further and be blown away all over again, dearest jazz worm, by Galliano & Wynton’s joyous From Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf: Live in Marciac that appeared in 2009. You won’t be squirming, modernist, toetapper refusenik, even. Bof? Be off with you. It’s a beaut.
But I digress and that album is far more scaled up and hardly intimate. Blossom is so European and specifically French. No kidding, Sherlock – the artists are French. It’s not hokey as some folky, smoky work can be, but it is more a period piece than when you listen to the blindingly contemporary vision of a piece like ‘River’ by Peirani that has a compelling chain gang kind of rhythm to the chug of it thumped out by Ziv Ravitz.
But Blossom‘s success – and succeed it certainly does – without any need for a deerstalker means its Gallic charm and imaginative, romantic, flavours export well. To paraphrase the words of Hal David if one would be so presumptuous: “Anyone who had a heart would take it in his arms and love it, too, fool.”
Blossom is a good thing unless you are some kind of Falangist Foraging little Engländer or insanely think that the only proper jazz comes from the home counties.
Trumpeter Airelle Besson has the power to communicate and to express: accordionist Lionel Suarez is both someone there to finish her sentences and to embark on his own new paragraphs.
Tunes are pithy, no one warbles, hums or scats – because it’s an instrumentals album (vocalisations like little mumurings are mimicked on ‘Au Lait’ cleverly by Besson who might have been tempted to melt in some found sounds) – and you must hear the originals as well as be swayed by the covers.
While I think Carla Bley’s ‘Ida Lupino’ which is one of these covers has been done too much in recent years and when someone does ‘Answer Me’ I can only think of Keith Jarrett and stop listening entirely given Jarrett has complete dominion over the piece, it’s an interesting choice choosing Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays’ Offramp piece ‘Au Lait’ from the 1980s. What a far better idea because only the avantist Noël Akchoté – like Besson and Suarez also from la belle France – has attempted the piece in recent years. And his treatment is far more fractured than this much more interesting gossamer-like treatment.
Elsewhere Suarez and Besson have appeared together in a quartet called Quarteto Gardel which is a tribute to tango master Carlos Gardel.
That tango feel is also a factor as are bal musette traditions a smidge on this charming and at times moving album which is full of delicate flow and sensitivity that also is fully equipped with passion and energy in all the right places as on Besson piece ‘La Course.’
Rosbifs: if you like Alexandra Ridout and haven’t a baldie who Besson is, her sound is a kissing cousin and like Ridout can do clarion cry and spirited, darting extemporisation. This latest is every bit as good as Besson’s Try by the way.
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