Trio Tasis - ...PORQUE Sí (2025)

This first album by the trio Tasis is not lacking in assets and this has not escaped the director of Triton, the jazz club of Les Lilas who wanted to release their first album under his indie label of independent music and organ. JP Vivante is committed to making known original works that could remain unknown, even unheard. PORQUE SÍ or the personal vision of tango, anchor music of the three virtuosos of this chamber trio with atypical instrumentation (bandoneon, piano, violin). They embellish their music with borrowings (their formidable musical culture allows them to) from classical music of the early 20th century (Bartok, Stravinsky …) to the song with this Parce que by Aznavour which takes on new colors under their fingers.

Radical, the trio is nonetheless in this desire to cut to the quick, not to seduce only tangueros, lovers of tangos of all kinds provided they can dance to these tunes. Which proves difficult on Porque sí, because the only instrumental, sometimes noisy, build-up gives a permanent tension to the whole, even the lulls of which are intense.

We are nevertheless on the lands of tango with the right amount of melancholy but also fury. Such flamboyant assaults, we ask for more without necessarily being a fan of the genre. Hence the invitation to a continuous listening of the eleven tracks never too long or heavy of an album carefully designed from the initial El Andariego by Alfredo Gobbi, one of the Argentinian masters of this style until the final Revirado by the immense Piazzola who needs no introduction, with these characteristic attacks of the bandoneon.

An updated tribute to the great Argentinians of tango Osvaldo Fresedo, Anselmo Aieta, Virgilio Exposito and a song Lucia by the only Spaniard - in fact Catalan (nuance), nicknamed the divine left where Carmela Delgado expresses the quintessence of the bandoneon, including the sound of the bellows.

A small hitch in the contract with the borrowing from Schönberg of his Farben (melodies of timbres and chords on five notes) not really written to evoke a tango, authorizes them to brilliantly survey other lands with a mischievous pleasure.

All these escapades, these crossings of stylistic borders in no way break the cohesion of the music of our three friends who have known each other for a long time. Fiery, very experienced, these young musicians can twirl from one style to another without really leaving room for soaring sounds: dull rumbles of the piano, vibrations of the pedals that punctuate a shadowy ensemble as if a storm were approaching and yet another solo borrowing from Chopin on the waltz Palomita Bianca, played in its time by another trio, that of Mosalini/Betelman/Caratini who also took up the tanguera saw of the Comparsita.

"Ease" that our trio does not allow itself, whose surges and bursts of a swaying bando we love, the lunar and often heartbreaking brilliance of the violin (the bow stretches certain high notes) sometimes distancing itself from the piano-bando continuo.

Refined soloists who risk themselves headlong into these vibrations of tones, rhythms and ranges. Their music draws wild lands. This dark beauty, refined in writing, if it impresses never prevents one from diving into this lyricism on the surface of the skin.

And jazz in all this? This music, luminous seems very written (three compositions by the violinist) for a collective devoted to the feminine powers of the piano-bandoneon orchestrated by an arranger as subtle as he is creative.

Mathias Naon indeed reveals the dispositions of a talented arranger with for example this amusing mechanism of the alarm clock (piano and bandoneon) on Mi Viejo Reloj & Variaciones. An adaptation of the so coded music of tango where each uses what is played and created in the moment in an often fusional exchange until the silences and sudden ruptures that break the undulation of the dance.

This more than perfect understanding irrigates these purely instrumental pieces, a height for tango which knew how to use voices. This does not in any way lack the Tasis trio of a hair-raising vitality that brings sap to a genre whose indestructible mechanics could sometimes tire. Purely delightful.

NB The Tasis trio will be in concert at the Festival de Radio France Montpellier from July 15 to 18, 2025….

Tracklist:

01. El Andariego
02. Parce que
03. Porque sí
04. Milongo (tiempos extraños)
05. Lucia
06. Mi viejo reloj & variaciones
07. Palomita blanca
08. La Marne
09. Absurdo
10. Farben
11. Revirado