Louis Sclavis - Eldorado Trio

2010 CD release.

This new cooperative trio with Craig Taborn and Tom Rainey brings a very unusual instrument combination in a very organic way pointing new ways to possible future colaborations by the best musicians from both sides of the Atlantic. The music on this CD brings a new ground to improvised music and that’s exactly what Sclavis had in mind when he brought this band together. Even If most of the pieces are compositions by Sclavis alone, “Eldorado Trio” really sounds like a non-hierarchical, equalitarian, band, with all the implications we can think of: no-one is really the “soloist”, and no-one has the established role to “accompany”.

The resulting music is pure gold, emanating a natural feeling: “A largely improvised music with some complex written parts, played by musicians with very similar dynamics and energy, but involved in different musical practices, able to complete each other and to easily find a group sound since the first note”, as Sclavis himself puts it. And no, there wasn’t the intention to design a “Franco-American connection”: “These musicians aren’t with me because they’re Americans, but because they are who they are – jazz is the consequence of this kind of encounters.” This is a landmark !