all sorts of jazz, improv or else - hot off the press

Comprised of twelve musical parts, Le Miroir des Ondes was composed around and from various news events that occurred between 1972 and 1989.
With it, Michel Blanc wanted to translate into music his own feelings about some events that crossed his life at the time, with the idea to convey to the listener a sound space that could penetrate his/her imagination, whether or not he/she would be aware of the events.
The choice of instrumentation for this project is based on major musical aesthetics of the time, namely: contemporary music, rock, concrete music and improvised music, and jazz derivatives.

This hybrid piece, where for the first time the musician has agreed to play the problematic role and function of ‘composer’, can be read both as a form of achievement and as a founding act.

Indeed, ‘composing’, as she makes it clear here, with the structure constantly generating and encouraging individual expression, is nothing else for her than a transposition to ‘another stage’ of the improviser’s gesture and a transfusion into a band’s plural entity of the complex spread of a thought both intimate and collective, made even more unique by its will to be shared. […] Because she constantly feeds all her experience as an improviser into her writing, Léandre has clearly created, with "Can You Hear Me?", a major milestone in her already illustrious career.
( from Stéphane Ollivier’s liner notes )

Sarah Murcia presents “Never Mind the Future”, a variation on the Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” album. In dissecting and reinterpreting each song, it is not a simple exercise in covering tunes but a will to actually feed on the music of the Sex Pistols in order to express hers. A music that blends jazz, rock and song, where Sarah Murcia is accompanied by her band ‘Caroline’, with the addition of pianist Benoît Delbecq and dancer/crooner Mark Tompkins. It is also a way to return to a mythical group and to a worship album that, as a listener, I myself started listening to when I was 8 years old... I guess it was just the right time for Sarah and I to meet one another and go forward with this project.