Olivier Robin - Take It Like It Is (2024) [Hi-Res]

Olivier Robin is an endearing and authentic sideman-leader. Performer, composer, improviser, accomplished musician, he gives us his travel stories with munificence. Olivier deploys with finesse and mastery a subtle and stimulating sound palette, inherent to his drumming and sublimated by the presence of his accomplices of the moment. If the foundation of the Jazz quintet tradition is set here as a fully inspiring framework, it is immediately the urgency of the “here and now” which calls out: a series of miniatures which lets us grasp, in a homogeneous and invigorating, the vitality and poetry of the subject thanks to the protagonists who animate it. Alongside Olivier, Albert Bover (piano), Fabricio Nicolas (double bass), in a resolutely involved rhythm section, come to magnify a writing that is as committed as it is delicate; constant attention paid to the melodic designs the lead of Josiah Woodson (tp, flugelhorn) and the second voices of Alex Terrier (alto sax, soprano sax) conducive to individual expressiveness in the continuity of the improvisation spaces: a musical setting that Olivier Robin shapes with talent.

Take it Like It is: brilliant performers serving sensitive and luminous writing. Keep on swinging gentlemen!

—Carine Bonnefoy (pianiste, compositrice)