LEON PHAL - Stress Killer (Deluxe) | 2LP

After a successful summer tour and a host of awards, the French jazz tenor is re-releasing his album Stress Killer in an expanded version including 4 unreleased tracks, on CD and 180g double vinyl. A lot has happened since Stress Killer was released just a year ago: with the New French Touch project that toured France's Smacs and his 70-date tour across Europe, North and South America, the French-Swiss saxophonist continues to build his audience by bringing jazz where it was least expected. It is a little of this journey, these influences and these encounters that he shares in this expanded edition. A desire to complete the journey and broaden the spectrum of his constantly evolving jazz. Heir to a certain academicism, a graduate of the Conservatoire and the Haute Ecole de Musique de Lausanne, Léon Phal's music is nevertheless far from being limited to the classics. On the contrary, and like his reinterpretation of Coltrane's "Naïma" from which he draws a wild version, he relies on the fundamentals but never remains imprisoned by them: for more than ten years, he has been developing this larger than jazz vision that modernizes the genre and pushes its boundaries. This is how heritage becomes the future, armored with hip-hop or electronic music, bringing together old and new in the service of lush, rich and unprecedented grooves. He invites singular voices, those of the French artist Brö, Lorine Chia or the free electron K.O.G., at once poet, singer and dancer, who amplify these stylistic positions. Originally solitary, Léon Phal's compositions are played out in front of a computer, where the man who studied the style of the greatest reinvents them alone. With an open instinct, driven by the inspiration of the moment, he rethinks the groove, searches, invents and modernizes classical thought to rub shoulders with contemporary influences, readily citing El Michels Affair, The Roots or Ahmad Jamal in the same sentence. But this is only a first step: everything ignites when he submits the fruit of his research to the quintet that surrounds him. On stage as well as on record, Arthur Alard (drums), Rémi Bouyssière (double bass), Gauthier Toux (keyboards) and Zacharie Ksyk (trumpet) reinterpret his ideas to deliver a dazzling version. We hear the pleasure of playing and dancing, the groove is irrepressible. From hard bop to club music, from rap to electro, his ingenious breath transforms classics into modern orchestrations, plays on nuances and details, on analogue and digital to project jazz into a new era. Crowned with prizes from Jazz à Vienne and Nancy Jazz Pulsations at the outset and with an already substantial discography, the composer is no longer content to digest the fundamentals and salute the pioneers: he now intends to make a place for himself among them, proof of which is here in 14 tracks.