(Modern Big Band, Contemporary Jazz) [WEB] Orchestre National De Jazz (Olivier Benoit, Bruno Chevillon, Alexandra Grimal, Eric Echampard a.o.) - Europa: Paris [2 CD] - 2014, FLAC (tracks), lossless

As a sort of nomad “work in progress” continuing throughout his mandate at the head of the ONJ, Olivier Benoit’s Europa program consists of a series of “city portraits”, forming a subjective, kaleidoscopic view of Europe’s contemporary music landscape. For the first stage of this ambitious journey, Olivier Benoit naturally chose to take a look around him and offer us this highly personal perspective of Paris.
Why Paris?
Mostly because that’s where I live! I’ve been working here for twenty years! In that sense, this new creation first came out of the desire to have some kind of evidence of that: a “reflection” or manifesto showing the brand-new things “being played” today, things that are specific to Paris as a great world capital for culture; Paris still draws musicians of all horizons, both geographically and stylistically. Today, Paris is a crucible, extraordinarily inventive in many ways, and it’s constantly evolving. This orchestra is made up essentially of musicians who are Parisians by adoption, all of them strongly implicated in the exuberant local music scene; for me, the orchestra ideally demonstrates the bubbling, hybrid movements that have always found a privileged space in major cities.
But in a more essential way, Paris also struck me as being the archetype of the Great City, a place for defining lines of force and the great themes I’d like to develop, not only in my work as a composer but also in empathy with the European musicians involved in this series of “portraits”.
Architecture and urban environments have always fascinated me, and so naturally I have a feel for such a vast and complex agglomeration as Paris; I see it as a kind of extraordinary, dynamic interlace whose motion has a wide variety of forms: the flux of its illuminations, its transport network, crowds moving through a maze of streets, the strange paths taken every day by men and women going from one place to another, with everyone driven by their own needs, desires and intimate motives… So, every great city expresses its own chaos, and architects and city-planners strive to make it fluid, give it a structure, organize it and, in the end, model it, indeed, re-invent it.
With this first piece of Europa, I looked at the multiple fluxes that represent the daily reality of Paris. The music gives shape to those movements, those more-or-less steady rhythms, all the increased cadences which eventually compose a “world” that is highly-organized, a world where each player, like a particle, finds a raison d’être, a goal, and takes part in the elaboration of the whole through that player’s unique imprint.
Like a living photograph of this great city performed by the musicians in the orchestra who belong to this urban inspiration, the score of this original repertoire not only reveals its incomparable structure, but also the force-fields generated by each element. And, in the end, it enables the poetic secret of Paris to be captured in its totality.