The album we keep returning to most. Full of spirit and of course being recorded in a Paris jazz club the Le Baiser Salé (''salty kiss'), replete with priceless, jauntily rocking, atmospherics. The back story is an earlier Jazz & People release from 2019 which didn't grab us as much as this new live album. French jazzer Magic Malik who was born in Ivory Coast and brought up in Guadeloupe made flute fashionable before it was fashionable. And to be frank no one is as close to the fundamental riotous spirit of Roland Kirk as Malik especially when he adds in nasal vocalisations, multiphonics and overblowing, highly effectively through his instrument.
The Paris jazz club scene was evocatively captured and fictionalised on 2020's Netflix serial The Eddy
And we also, while in this vein of thinking, journey back to an imagining of what it must be like hearing jazz in Paris not just in the present but in the impossible cool of the past and to the daddy of them all - Bertrand Tavernier's beautiful 1986 bebop strewn homage to Bud Powell and Lester Young depicted in the classic Round Midnight starring Dexter Gordon. Just about the best jazz feature film we think ever made.
Not at all a case of bonjour, tristesse the album opens with a fetching take on Wayne Shorter's 'Oriental Folk Song' found on the A side of 1964 Blue Note classic Night Dreamer. With Malik are a reunion from that earlier album because pianist Maxime Sanchez, bassist Damien Varaillon, trumpeter Olivier Laisney and drummer Stefano Lucchini are on board. Wayne's 'Big Push' from 1979's The Soothsayer, Curtis Fuller's' 'Bu's Delight,' Gordon Jenkins classic 'Goodbye' - then Coltrane (Malik endearingly wild on 'Moment's Notice') and Eric Dolphy staples follow. Malik audaciously (not at all) - more his prerogative as leader - slips in his own tune 'Joyeux Printemps'. It's all feelgood, full of a puckish fun dimension and above all radiates life and the audience seemed more than up for it given the gallimaufry of Gallic audience reaction and ripples of deserved applause littering the joint. Ain't it a great way to gain a feeling of the unique atmosphere of a jazz club on a live album all over again.
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