Thomas de Pourquery
Magma

Six decades after Super-Sonic Jazz (1957) which for Sun Ra and his Arkestra launched an intriguingly prophetic return to the Saturn label (“Home! Home!”), saxophonist, singer and composer Thomas De Pourquery (aged 41 when on stage in July) still hears his message loud and clear. He proved it by naming his own sextet Supersonic (which also reflects the speed with which the recording took place), and above all with the famous Play Sun Ra, voted ‘Best Album of the Year’ at the 2014 Victoires du Jazz awards ceremony. The following summer, the strapping man from Bondy (where he was born in 1977) fully confirmed it at the closing of the Jazz à Vienne festival. Since then, Thomas De Pourquery has joined Magnetic Ensemble for an EP released in 2015, formed a pop duo on Naive Records with Maxime Delpierre, recorded Broadways (2016) with the Red Star Orchestra and written the soundtrack to the film The Law of the Jungle by Antonin Peretjatko (2016). And finally at the 2017 Victoires du Jazz awards ceremony, he was crowned ‘Artist of the Year’. One night, under a full moon, the music to Sons of Love (Label Bleu - 2017) came to him in a dream like a thunderbolt. Love lounges around and is then knocked about on this tenth album carried by the leader’s falsetto voice and alto sax, and sculpted by his five supersonic accomplices from the worlds of jazz (Megaoctet, Sacre du Tympan, ONJ), electro rock (Poni Hoax) and drum & bass (Big).

Line-up : Thomas de Pourquery (as, voc, k, perc), Arnaud Roulin, (p, synth, k), Fabrice, Martinez (trp, bgl, voc, perc), Laurent Bardainne (ts, voc), Edward Perraud (dms, voc, electronics), Frederick Galiay (b, voc), Arnaud Pichard (son)

Photo : © Edward Perraud

Paris (Le Triton), 27 January 2018: Christian Vander’s band came across as a really tight septet (no vibraphone) of superb musicians. A war machine roaring around the possessed drummer. The long introduction to ‘Mekanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh’ allowed Vander to chant like a shaman. Hammered out by Jérôme Martineau on the electric piano. The familiar, obsessive theme calls to mind the Fela Afrobeat trance. Magma, incandescent, inextinguishable, turns on the lights inside and plunges into darkness. The ‘Zombies’ and‘Da Futura’ themes are delivered in a barbed funk style, obsessively, to the point of implosion. As if the New JB’s were sitting on the electric chair, with Coltrane for the last Meditations. And while Tyson from Nogent-sur-Marne is pulverising his cymbals, Magma 2018 is still not laughing, forty-eight years after Kobaïa (1970)! It strings together elegiac movements (the voices of Stella Vander, Isabelle Feuillebois and Hervé Aknin) and sudden volcanic eruptions, and advances through ruptures in the wake of Šlaǧ Tanƶ (2015). This is only the thirteenth studio album (as opposed to fifteen live recordings) by Magma, the subject of a recent film by director Laurent Goldstein: The Music of Magma. The documentary Nihao Hamtaï, charts Magma’s first ever tour in China during the winter of 2016. Is Magma still molten? Zeuhl!

Line-up : Christian Vander (dms, voc), Stella Vander (voc), Isabelle Feuillebois (voc), Hervé Aknin (voc), Jérôme Martineau (p), Benoit Alziary (vb), Rudy Blas (g), Philippe Bussonnet (b), Avec la participation de Pierre Latute (tb), Paul Antoine Roubet (s), Illyes Ferrera (s), David Mimey (s), Julien Buros (s)

Photo : © Jean-Baptiste Millot