Recommended: Laurent Rochelle – “Les Amours Invisibles”

 

laurent-rochelle-les-amours-invisiblesIt’s not just that Les Amours Invisibles is an album woven from the fabric of gorgeous melodies and how harmonies pour across songs like morning light filling an empty room, but it’s the way that multi-instrumentalist Laurent Rochelle guides his own melodic development to that of his ensemble’s and how he fluctuates between melodic nuance and the confluence of a grand unity that marks this recording’s success.  It’s not a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction… it is the way a flock of birds come together as a murmuration then break off again into their individual flight patterns… yet still are locked in with one another.  It’s where the togetherness of individual expressions are still part of the united whole.

The string section is a huge uniting force, which has the additional effect of accentuating those moments when soloists break free and parallel its path and run the circumference of its borders.  And when another ensemble member initiates a similar pattern switching between joins with Rochelle and communion with strings, then the effect is magnified dramatically.  In that way Rochelle’s bass clarinet and Loïc Schild‘s marimba hypnotize through repetition on “Passages” and yet swim in the flow of the string section.  And in that way that the electronic effects, violins, and the guitar of Denis Frâjerman generate a pulsing tempo on “Coda” that marries with Rochelle’s melodic sighs on soprano sax.  And how Rochelle, switching over to piano on “Quelques notes de pluie sur un grand piano noir” moves between a role as defining the path ahead and becoming just another traveler within the melody.  And it’s in the way that Rochelle modulates the dramatic surges so that the emotional discharge always comes off as sincere and not a gratuitous tug at the heartstrings.

It’s why this album can be so daringly beautiful and remain the genuine thing.

It’s why you should by this album.

Your album personnel:  Laurent Rochelle (alto & soprano saxophones, clarinet, bass clarinet, piano, melodica, accordion, violin, Fender Rhodes, theremin, percussion, electronic effects & programming, voice), Nathalie Boullanger (violin), Marie-Florence Ricard (alto violin), Julianne Trémoulet (cello), Marie-Madeleine Mille (cello), Laurent Avizou (guitar), Denis Frâjerman (guitar), Edit Gergely, Alima Hamel, Audrey Durand (voices), Masako Ishimura (flute), Laurent Paris (percussion), Loïc Schild (drums, marimba) and Cédric Marcucci (drums).

Released in 2012 on Linoleum Records.

Listen to more of the album on the artist’s Bandcamp page.

Jazz from the Toulouse, France scene.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon