So this is the music that space travel was invented for. Enter the old warehouse a few minutes too late, in the darkness of which only the LED spotlights of the stage glow and fire a crew of musicians with light energy – and immediately picked up into the infinite expanses of space, as if someone had erased gravity and the warp -Drive diverted to four instruments. Something like that only happens on Thursdays at EBE-Jazz, and only when Michel Benita and his band are a guest. “Looking up Sounds” was the name of the program for this evening, which turned out to be an honest promise not only because of the musical overcoming of physical laws. Those who indulged in these 90 minutes were allowed to feel like someone who overtook William Shatner’s short trip to the limits of space on the left.
One of them did an outstanding job: Michel Matthieu, the man at the flugelhorn, is a daring and skilful engineer. The struts and structures that he erected with his instrument adorned every futuristic machine. Or appear as if they had just sprung from the fantasy of a science fiction draftsman. The Swiss man doses his breath so accurately that there is not a breath too much or too little, but movements become audible as the wind generates in the field and which we can barely grasp with our thoughts. At the same time he is the acoustic dominant in the quartet, setting the tone in both the stylistic and the rhythmic sense. In contrast to the harrowing trombone or the brash trumpet, the sound of the flugelhorn also has a texture that surrounds the melody and its audience in such a way that escape is impossible (and undesirable). A protective suit against all earthly temptations. You want to lie down in it and feel the warmth in the friction, you want to be caressed by it and vibrate with the shivers that chase your auditory nerves. A fascinating idea of jazz, probably unearthly.
The fact that listening to Jean-Michel Jarre for a long time reminds you of the style of Jean-Michel Jarre also has to do with the characteristic sound of the Fender Rhodes, played by Jozef Dumoulin with unabashed casualness. He hardly makes a face, hardly moves his arms and hands – and yet he pulls one sound trick after the other from the electronic circuits. Electric trick? Or is it sound shapes that are created under the gifted hands of a clay sculptor? This is the direction in which your thoughts turn while listening when you try to imagine the flow of electrical current through the abstract sculpture made of cables that hang like digital dreadlocks over the back of the instrument. A mental ride into satellite technology also comes to mind, while the melodies digitally propagate and float away in the loop, while their creator is apparently already working on new circuits.
A few minutes further, when the other three vary his templates, build on them their own ideas of where this piece should turn, the cable harness gets its body, stretches its limbs, reaches for the stars – or whatever up there May be above the attic – and puts the audience in an orbit that Captain Kirk could only dream of. With a seductively minimalist man in the engine room, the drummer Philippe Garcia, we recognize: weightlessness, if it penetrates through the ear, then like this. Which, when listening, leads to throwing off the ballast of everyday life and floating away into a phase of blissful existence that is no longer waking and not yet sleeping.
Finally, the double bass solo of the band leader turns into a delicacy, electronically amplified vibrations, energetic and sensual, finally changing from the plucked ballad to the driving rhythm of a pulsar, doing aerobatics through the rarest galaxies of EBE-Jazz. At the tables the earthly people cheer, wave and applaud, who cannot get enough of what is floating through time and space.