The Wynton Marsalis Quintet & Richard Galliano - From Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf: Live in Marciac (2010) {Repost}

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The Wynton Marsalis Quintet & Richard Galliano - From Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf: Live in Marciac (2010) {Repost}

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In the summer of 2008 multiple Grammy award winning jazz artist Wynton Marsalis and his quintet teamed-up with French accordionist Richard Galliano at the annual Jazz in Marciac festival in Southern France to pay tribute to the late jazz legends Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf. The result is a live recording, CD/DVD deluxe combination that captures this magical performance by two modern legends. The album, entitled The Wynton Marsalis Quintet & Richard Galliano - From Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf: Live in Marciac, captures the magical 9-song set list translating classic jazz vocal compositions into artful instrumental versions that are striking in their rhythmic variety.

The first breathes the past into his present; the second, vice versa. Beyond their careers, what do these two soloists have in common, if not something greater than they are? It had to be two women, two legends, naturally: Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday. Each might have followed in the other’s footsteps, so much did their lives resemble a Greek tragedy with traits exacerbated by the twentieth century; each carried scars too visible to be appeased by the unction of fame. Pain at the limit of their voices, hard times, that rose-tinted view («la vie en rose») which turned blue when Gloomy Sunday* dawned…those clichés and, more than that, the titles one associates with the two, say it all…
Even so, does this virtuoso-trumpet and emancipated-accordion pairing announce just another fling between jazz and the popular French waltz they call the java? The whirling themes of the latter, a suggestion of swing beyond swing, are present of course; the music sways in motion and, although with a different mathematical elasticity, it appears to have been seasoned by some transatlantic kiss. Above all, there’s that cross-culture which Richard Galliano proclaims—from Bach to Satie and from Charlie Parker to Bill Evans— and Richard has done more than just camouflage its trail (transmuting himself into a harmonica, piano, organ, flute, furtive breath, even…); he has established the accordion within the jazz family.

Probably, too, Wynton Marsalis’ association with classical music, not forgetting his admiration for Maurice André, and his adaptation to the culture of France’s musical codes (reinforced by his yearly pilgrimages to Marciac) have become an obvious inclusion to his unparalleled work in jazz, a legacy of which he is now much more than the curator-in-chief. An entire emotional genealogy escapes from the bell of Wynton’s trumpet, masterfully so, like a family-tree whose bark has been rubbed with the bracing garlic of his imagination; his phrases are boldly meditated, and as controlled as they remain expressive…with or without that plunger from the echos of Ellingtonia.
And so it was that, in reaching out to each other, by turns with Billie and Edith on their arms, they brought to its feet the Marciac marquee filled with people who came to hear a sparrow perched on a gardenia.