Live in Paris: Song for a Newborn
One of our primary goals for our Jazz from Rant music label has always been to document the music that might otherwise be lost, rare encounters of improvised music and musical meetings that arose out of special circumstances.
This new track we are releasing is exactly that, a song from the closing concert of Michel’s residency at the Quebec Studio in Paris in 2007 (merci CALQ). It was a cool night in December and the concert hall was in the Cité internationale des arts next to the Seine. Michel invited me, bassist Jean Jacques Avenel and pianist Bobby Few to perform. I recorded it with a little portable Zoom player balanced on the edge of the stage. We had a great time, the audience enjoyed it and soon after we returned to Montreal.
And the audio files were lost in a myriad of laptops and desktops over the years, busy years of parenting young children, renovating, travelling, juggling tours, residencies and creativity.
In the spring of this year we embarked on our downsizing/upgrading adventure, an overdue overhaul of our living circumstances. I cleaned computers before donating them and while doing so I searched on multiple hard drives to find the concert back. And I succeeded!
The title is Song for a Newborn, a poem I wrote when my second son, Theo, was just three weeks old. It is the story of a newborn communicating firmly with his mother. The very talented and inventive musicians picked up the energy immediately and expressed it effortlessly.
So we offer it to you now as we begin this new cycle of our lives, hopefully a golden age of some sort or the birth of a new beginning. We wish Jean-Jacques and Bobby were still with us to celebrate this release but we are grateful for their collaboration and happy that the music lives on. As for the newborn, he did the cover art!