For this fifteenth album in his career, the indispensable composer and saxophonist Yannick Rieu provokes an encounter between jazz music and classical writing by drawing inspiration from the work of a beacon of the Romantic era, the German composer Johannes Brahms — not by directly quoting his music or by taking up his themes, but by drawing on the richness of his orchestrations and harmonic progressions, to offer an album of seven original compositions from which emerge the refinement and elegance to which Rieu has accustomed us. Mainly interpreted on the soprano saxophone, his compositions seem more cheerful, his melodies, more scintillating. Joining him in the studio were Jonathan Cayer (piano, particularly inspired during the solo of Hungarian Dance), Louis-Vincent Hamel (drums) and Rémi-Jean LeBlanc (double bass) to form a high-flying quartet, suggesting a fugue, complex and unpredictable, in Counterpoint for Johanneseven making Brahms’ memory cool jazz (A Fairy Tale). Stage launch on July 26 and 27 at Dièse Onze.
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