L'Arbre Rouge, Hugues Mayot - Invocations (2023) Hi Res

Invocations is the second album from Hugues Mayot’s first band under his own name, L’Arbre Rouge. The outstanding French saxophonist and clarinetist has assembled a select group of musicians: alongside his old comrades Sophie Bernado on bassoon and Joachim Florent on bass, he has renewed his quintet with Clément Janinet (violin) and Bruno Ducret (cello), who may already be familiar to the audience of BMC Records.

Hugues Mayot has long been known as a sideman in projects by musicians such as Pierre Durand and Marc Ducret, and in bands such as Magma and Radiation 10. Between 2014 and 2018 he also played in the “French national team”, the Orchestre Nationale de Jazz. He then launched two bands on his own: the quartet What If, with Jozef Dumoulin, Franck Vaillant and Joachim Florent, whose album was released on ONJ, and L’Arbre Rouge, whose debut album was released by BMC Records in 2019. Back then, the band included Théo and Valentin Ceccaldi, alongside Bernado and Florent, who have been playing with Mayot ever since. The line-up of L’Arbre Rouge now creates multiple connections between the French musician “families” formed around BMC Records: the former string section has been replaced by two members of La Litanie des Cimes, Clément Janinet and Bruno Ducret (the trio’s album Woodlands will be released in September). Mayot and Florent also play in Janinet’s quartet O.U.R.S., whose album has been receiving more than positive reviews since September 2022. The latest recordings by L’Arbre Rouge and O.U.R.S. have both been awarded the “Élu” (Citizen Jazz) and “Choc” (Jazz Magazine) ratings, which is a clear indication that the personalities of the band leaders and members guarantee a musical experience of the highest quality.

But the links do not stop there: Mayot and his newly joined colleagues mutually reinforce each other’s interests and compositional wit as well. Mayot’s endeavours show a rather hidden interest in world music, while Janinet’s projects have an obvious emphasis on a variety of traditional music, and as with O.U.R.S., the influence of contemporary classical music and American minimalism is inescapable in the songs of Invocations. L’Arbre Rouge is an acoustic string and wind quintet with no drums, guitar or piano, so the quintet maintains a chamber music sound. Their music is at once delightful and complex, often surfacing in seemingly endless, repetitive and drifting pieces, with a touch of experimental psychedelia.