Michel Edelin Quartet | Resurgence | RogueArt Jazz

Here is a group that is not mere circumstance a group that has a sense of durability! Eighteen years after an already accomplished first recording, the four musicians show in any case that the disorganized effects of commercial culture have no influence on an artistic desire newly reaffirmed in this gushing Resurgence, leaving eleven themes/sources drifting on its unique current linked in a distanced aesthetic which does not challenge the history of jazz but is known to be gaily unsubdued by current trends and to codes which guide a certain “European jazz”. — Bernard Aime (Translation Marie Alleyrat) Continue reading

Michel Edelin Trio | Kuntu | RogueArt Jazz

Flutists’ albums, in jazz, do not clutter up record stores. Michel Edelin is one of the (very) few jazz musicians, French on top of that, to have chosen the flute, in all its forms, as his exclusive instrument. For ages, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Eric Dophy, Jeremy Steig, James Newton, Dave Valentin and the likes have held a central position in his personal pantheon, he who was able to digest their teachings in order to feed his own syntax: a sound of a beautiful elegance, an angular phrasing where a propensity for melody and lyricism can be heard, a taste for certain instrumental audacities, the understanding of the collective… …This album of a complete openness, breathing onto the melody, is collectively constructed in real time around pretext-themes with great rigor and a radiant imagination. — Gérard Rouy, excerpt from the liner notes Continue reading

Hamid Drake | Nicole Mitchell | Harrison Bankhead | Michel Edelin | Indigo Trio | The Ethiopian Princess Meets The Tantric Priest | RogueArt Jazz

Nicole Mitchell and Michel Edelin are two of the most creative flutists in music of any sort today, brilliant improvisers with highly developed sensitivities to sound. Yet their personal approaches to playing one of the oldest instruments in the world represent two far ends of an esthetic spectrum… … So The Ethiopian Princess Meets the Tantric Priest demonstrates what happens when opposite poles touch. Like a marvel of physics, the reverberations generate something new: in this case, previously unimagined dimensions of pure song. The sonic spheres the Princess and the Priest conjure – with wonderful support from bassist/pianist Harrison Bankhead and drummer Hamid Drake – are akin to what’s born by a spirit of the air in congress with a guardian of the earth… — Howard Mandel, excerpts from the liner notes Continue reading