There is so much personality on this recording.
And yet stepping back before pressing play the thought of swing guitar can seem very dated.
Not this as it turns out although Elegant People is highly lived in and the tempos are adjusted for all round comfort.
Not at all about coasting though or resting on laurels: There is plenty of improvising beyond the themes. It’s not a rigidly doctrinaire approach at all.
Take the piano solo on the Wayne Shorter Weather Report title track delivered by Jean-Yves Jung.
And yet let’s not get distracted because it is not however piano playing – archetypal or otherwise – that you have arrived at the album for, or is it?
More blistering virtuoso guitar instead, surely. But perhaps you see just as lazy shorthand 59 year old Biréli Lagrène as essentially a gypsy jazz guitarist and feel he is a known quantity.
If so then think again on this evidence, the sound of surprise as jazz is sometimes known triumphs once again for all its plurality and subversion of expectation.
The French jazzer hasn’t had a significant release in years.
This certainly rewrites that theory for now.
The album has a live feel and there is plenty of engagement whether emanating from the exuberant drumming of Raphaël Pannier trading licks with Lagrène on the title track, or by contrast the sentimentalism of Gilbert O’Sullivan song ‘Clair’ that is a hard to resist highlight.
Other thoughts: the mystical aura of ‘Hopla’ melts simmeringly; and for romance Johnny Mandel’s ‘A Time for Love’ is a delight.
But including ‘My Foolish Heart’ perhaps risks over familiarity. The arrangement that centres on the bass of William Brunard at first is at best serviceable. But much as I love the classic song this isn’t the album’s shiniest moment.
That’s reserved for other goodies. Better is the version of the Ivan Lins song ‘Anjo de Mim’ that brings out a few George Benson type touches from the leader. The Portuguese language song goes back to the mid-1990s and was interpreted in English later as ‘I’m Not Alone’ with lyrics by Will Jennings.
There’s a bustle to ‘W 48th St’ that flatters to deceive because it loses something after an appealing opening.
It’s funny that a Lagrène tune called ‘Flair’ arrives on the tail of ‘Clair’. Hardly a rhyme to write home about but the latter melody is catchy and has a playful bluesiness to it.
Gypsy jazz isn’t forgotten about on this October 2025 studio recording made at a place in Malakoff, in the southern Parisian suburbs – it crops up on ‘Kings Cross’ that leads via a stirring violin solo into a fab time signature and feel change when the players up the swing quotient for a rampaging Hammond OGD (organ, guitar, drums) type foray. It’s Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Smith territory for sure. Episodes such as this make you love an album – that is already dead easy to like – so much more.
