Baz Trio - L'homme bleu (2020)

The Baz Trio, born in 2018 under the leadership of double bassist Basile Rahola with pianist Wajdi Riahi and drummer Oscar Georges, won the first prize for "Best Group" at the International Jazz Contest in Mechelen (Belgium) in 2018 and he is a finalist of the International Zilina Jazz Contest (Slovakia) and the Dînant Jazz Contest. After an album recorded live at the Jamboree Jazz Club in Barcelona in April 2019, the trio are about to release L’Homme Bleu, boxed at studio 44.1 in Girona on the prestigious label Fresh Sound New Talent. In preview here is a recording made by Dennis Garcia de Tawa, which now means in Tunisian. A dynamic composition full of nuances by Basile Rahola who signs almost all the songs on the disc: "The album echoes the blue men of the Sahara, the Tuaregs, enjoying great freedom, in an immense, silent environment, and in perpetual change ”, confides us the double bass player for whom the album is the result of very personal things.

The starting point of the adventure is the meeting of the double bass player with the pianist during a tour in Tunisia. Basile Rahola won over by Wajdi Riahi's game immediately thinks of making him meet his musical brother, Oscar Georges, residing in Brussels. Living in Barcelona at the time, Basile organized a series of concerts in the center of everyone's living space. It is therefore in Lyon that he brings his scores. The osmosis was such that he immediately embarked on writing pieces inspired by the color of this new group with its spacious sound that sometimes recalls the trio of pianist Shaï Maestro or the beautiful hours of E.S.T. (Esbjörn Svensson Trio). Wajdi Riahi is himself very inspired by the playing of Brad Mehldau, specifies the double bass player:

"He plays with the heart and opens a field of possibilities which is really enormous. I love with him, this feeling of freedom. He has a culture of traditional Tunisian and Arabic music in general so in his playing there is a whole language, an articulation specific to this music which brings a rather particular color to the sound of the trio."