Erik Truffaz – atmospherics plus it was!

The Embassy of France and the Alliance Francaise de Colombo hosted an evening with Erik Truffaz and his Quartette at the British School Auditorium on Saturday, January, 27; a freshening experience that offered its own subtle challenges and auditory allurements.

The event was billed as a "jazz" concert, but there was nary a hint of the over-worn 'standards' of Tin-pan-alley, and there was no 'blues' either albeit the vernacular of the jazz mainstream was certainly in evidence in the leader's trumpet, Malcolm Braff's piano/keyboards, Christophe Chambet's electric bass and Marc Erbetta's drums. Rather, 'atmospherics' of a contemporary and compelling kind were generated by this cohort, which over a few selections during the evening included two players from Colombo, Ravibandu Vidyapathi (tabla) and Sarangan Sri Ranganathan (amplified sitar).

Truffaz is a recording artist with the Blue Note label, which from the Sri Lankan perspective is a singular occurrence since performers of that rarefied coterie do not usually come by these shores, at least not that easily! The present aggregation were not part of his most recent albums for the label, although the drummer Erbetta has had long years of experience with Truffaz at different times.

The trumpet player's eclecticism can easily be appreciated in his recorded output, especially from his festival/live concert offerings, where he comfortably melds ethnic strains of voice, rhythm and melody accommodating north African and Moorish elements, and at times 'rap' and hip-hop - therefore, it comes as no surprise to have him attempt bringing the south Indian ethos hoping to tame the micro-tonal "ragic" scale into the mix of the well-tempered instruments at hand. I dare say Braff at his synthesizer-keyboard was able to squeeze up some eager, fair-to-middling and convincing 'responses' to the 'calls' issuing from the sitarist. Whether this excursion translates beyond the merely experimental is a moot point, though none seemed a loser.

The trumpet player led his band from 'behind' in that he served as a musical alchemist who presided over the tempestuous maelstrom of sound and rhythm driven and whipped up with enthusiasm over most of the selections by the piano, bass and drums, while Truffaz himself played a forlorn horn via his miked hookup through a sample-loop as well as a chorus effect-generator maintaining his arching lyricism which seemed divorced from the dizzying trajectory followed by his mates.

At times it was a teeter-totter careening in a typically mesmeric drum 'n' bass cycle erupting from Erbetta abetted by Chambet with dense chordal poundings at the piano. On another it was a fetching Caribbean reggae-like disposition that was evident with some deft extra-pianistic devices from Braff, where he reached over and dampened the piano strings with his left palm, while creating a rhythmic figure a la John Cage. And in each, Truffaz who possesses a delightfully Chet Baker-like sweet and warm tone, less brassy and more in the flugelhorn range of sound, would play his simple, logically conceived melodic lines, woven through the milieu with a Brechtian sense of detachment and a cool head.

With the exception of one sumptuous ballad comprising lush chordal shifts akin to Billy Strayhorn's, the other opuses were deceptively complex because of the energy being released by the rhythm section, but in fact hardly arcane and were grounded on quite uncomplicated harmonic changes. [For contrast: think of Suessdorf's "Moonlight In Vermont" or Golson's "Whisper Not"]
Pianist Malcolm Braff usually 'took charge' of the directional impetus with his combination of Hal Galper like density and hard-edged lyricism one associates with Hancock. Without exception drummer Erbatta was equal to the task, supportive and vigilant to extract every poly-rhythmic possibility from the process and then inspired everyone to drive toward even higher levels of spontaneous creativity. With this writer, the evening's "heroes" were they! One felt privileged to glimpse at such close proximity the collective creative process, which for the past 100 odd years has been the defining ethic of the improvisers' art.