"One still hears a lot of special pleading for the violin in jazz, as if – despite the efforts of everyone from Stuff Smith and Joe Venuti to Jean-Luc Ponty, Zbigniew Seifert and Michał Urbaniak – it still isn’t considered quite “proper” for the music, too “European” or “classical”. In reality, the very first “jazz” groups were probably small string ensembles, playing after-hours in spaces down below the big house, maybe in amongst the master’s cherished clarets and ports, accompanied by strange echoes and bangs. So maybe what Régis Huby, Bruno Chevillon and Michele Rabbia have created on Reminiscence, for all its modern means, is a set of music that goes back in form and feeling to the very earliest days of a great music. It takes a certain gift to make electronic effects as warmly immediate and physical as so-called “acoustic” instruments, as more than “effects”, but that is the gift of Huby, Chevillon and Rabbia on Reminiscence, a profoundly involving and often complex set of interlocked sequences recorded at the Livio Felluga Winery in Brazzano di Cormòns, Italy. This is music that doesn’t need scare quotes. Whether it is “jazz”, “post-jazz” or something beyond jazz altogether, ultimately doesn’t matter. What does is its intense and evolving engagement with the musical material and with an audience. In instrumentation and in setting it is just the latest and quite logical stage in a long creative evolution". (Brian Morton)
CAM JAZZ
