(Contemporary Jazz) Christophe Dal Sasso - Ressac - 2013, MP3, 320 kbps

French composer, arranger and flutist Christophe Dal Sasso plays with colors, sounds and feelings to deliver a magnificent impressionist record. After adapting works from the French classical repertoire with Lionel Belmondo and putting together bespoke scores for artists such as saxophone player David Liebman, Brazilian popular singer Milton Nascimento and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, Christophe Dal Sasso sets off on a new musical adventure of his own. Based on a performance that brings together on the same stage a writer/actor, a classical pianist and an orchestra led by jazzmen, Ressac can be viewed as the culmination of a personal journey.
In devising the project, Christophe Dal Sasso’s goal was to build bridges between various means of artistic expression, and notably to bridge the gap between the verbal alchemy of poetry – with texts written and performed by David Belmondo – and the magic properties of music, whose evocative power remains a mystery. And so a gesture, a movement of transit begins to stand out at the heart of this 11-piece ensemble. It relates to the shift from what is written to what is improvised, the private to the collective, the composer to the soloist, the words spoken to the notes played.
If Ressac (backwash) is certainly connected to the Mediterranean Sea, whose shores formed the landscape of Christophe Dal Sasso’s childhood, but also to moments of transition in life which shape our existence and turn our souls upside down so much so that we sometimes need to convert these experiences into music to better overcome them.
Ressac thus turns out to be the fruit of research carried out by a composer whose body of work, stroke by stroke, makes up a face without, however, laying bare all of its outlines, leaving it up to the shadow to portray light and to the music to sublimate words.