Pierre-Francois Blanchard - #puzzled (2024)

#puzzled is the first record that pianist Pierre-François Blanchard signs under his own name, with clarinetist Thomas Savy as brother in arms – and even brother in soul. It is both a source and a delta: a place where everything converges without being reduced, unravels to better begin, ends to be better recaptured, recomposed.

Erasing any gap between writing and improvisation, Pierre-François Blanchard has been surveying a landscape for twenty years that has taken him from classical to jazz, from composition for the theater to song. But it is his map of Tender that he unfolds here, illuminated by the array of experiences and encounters that have marked his path.

Four encounters, like cardinal points. First of all, Pierre Barouh, free rein captain of the Saravah label, offline figure of the song for which Pierre-François and his piano, for five years, carried the inspiration and the appetites. Then Archie Shepp, who integrated it into his quartet in 2017, and Raphaël Imbert, who made it one of the pillars carrying his research jazz: two saxophonists whose breath carries a burn that is both ancestral and always new. Finally Marion Rampal, the essential friend, with whom Pierre-François sieves the gold of the Secret, intertwining Fauré, Legrand, Brigitte Fontaine, Debussy... or Barouh.

From this desire for musical humanities, #puzzled draws its deep substance. That of a walker who strolls between worlds to better connect them – from the shimmer of French music from the beginning of the 20th century to the colorist art of a Duke Ellington, from the beauties of counterpoint to the harmonic combinations of a Brad Meldhau . And it is no coincidence that this wordless diary ended up emerging from the parenthesis imposed by confinement. “I’m not afraid to say that it was a period of artistic jubilation. For three weeks, I wrote a piece a day. It marked for me a return to interiority, but also to the capacity to transcend it and share it.”

#puzzled feeds on this vital circulation between what Henri Michaux called the space inside and the space outside. Continuous breath that introspection shapes, that fever bristles in places, and to which Thomas Savy lends the neuralgic accuracy of his clarinet. “Thomas, whom I met ten years ago, immediately expressed a very sensitive interest in what I was writing: I have not forgotten this signal. I knew he would honor this music while shaking it up, overturning the table when necessary.”

A double movement that we perceive from the opening title, Backtrack. Around a slow bass ostinato, the piece completes a convolution that deviates from its axis, goes through turbulence before returning to its starting point – safe and sound, but forever transformed. Every #puzzled takes part in this journey rich in revelations, twists and turns and bumps. Introspective ruminations like Afterglow are matched by pieces with more cursive writing like Asmara or C’est par où?, where piano and clarinet engage in an aerial ballet as burlesque as it is graceful. Walks along chasms – Pré vert, dedicated to Barouh, or Tempêtes, where the gripping melody of our greatest heartbreaks – responds to the exploration of unfathomable interior abysses – Fears, inspired by disappearance of a friend who died of cancer.

Weaving the threads of memory, pure sensation and language, Pierre-François Blanchard activates between them a whole game of correspondences and echoes, favoring the accuracy of the touch(s) over the effects of the handle, the acuity of the expression to any performance imperative. It is a singular beat that guides the listener, the pulsation specific to those who have kept their amateur heart, far from academies and competitions. Beat which leads to the piece #puzzled, whose title resonates like a sesame, since it expresses in English the state of confusion and perplexity in the face of emotions whose nature escapes us, disconcerts us and haunts us. Beat that powders and becomes light in Lullaby for Freedom, concluded with a final release, a final tangent towards infinity. Towards the rest of the story, perhaps?