Artist: Three Days of Forest
Album: Four Trees
Genre: Vocal Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Modern Creative
Label: Garden Records
Released: 2024
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Great Trees (4:33)
- Voiceover (3:54)
- Fox (2:23)
- My Taste (2:49)
- Secret Garden (3:13)
- Sadie and Maud (3:40)
- For Fear (3:10)
- Crazy Woman (2:29)
- We Real Cool (3:26)
- Three Days of Forest (4:52)
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- Personnel:
- Angela Flahault - vocals
- Severine Morfin - viola
- Blanche Lafuente - drums, pad
Four poets, three musicians, one magician. It's the perfect formula for a departure into the unknown: three days in the Three Days of Forest (TDOF) and a compass that does as it pleases. Between the melancholy balladry of “We Real Cool” and the sour pop bubble of “Fox”, the long-awaited trio around Séverine Morfin create a whole universe. Two of the songwriters sung by Angela Flahault, whose majestic performance with the Orchestre du Tricot is well remembered, are contemporary African-Americans. Sheila Dove is the youngest and best-known; born in working-class Akron, Ohio, it is she who most inspires Three Days of Forest, to the point of giving them their name in a song where Blanche Lafuente's drums anchor in reality a dream of light and shadow, where Morfin's bow heats her viola to white to cauterize the wounds of strangeness.
But who is the magician? It's of course Céline Grangey, the sound engineer who, once again, shapes a rich, highly poetic atmosphere, as she did with Mad Mapple, another of the viola player's projects, or with Lila Bazooka. In “Great Tree”, Angela Flahault's deep voice evokes some of the old Gaelic legends, where women are not confined to the role of princesses, over Séverine Morfin's heady playing; further on, in “Sadie & Maud”, the viola acts in depth, as if multiplied in the choruses and worked by Blanche Lafuente's pad. Grangey maps out the universe of these musicians very well, without limiting the space and favoring the confines. TDOF's feminist paradigm is not asserted; it simply is. The choice of authors speaks for itself, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of the pioneers of the American feminist movement. “For Fear”, a beautiful exchange between Morfin and Lafuente, is even one of her most famous texts, chanted like a spoken word by the impeccable singer.
The importance of Blanche Lafuente in setting the orchestra's tone is obvious. A late arrival in the trio, replacing Florian Satche who was part of TDOF when it won Jazz Migration #4 in 2018, Nout's drummer brings a surplus of rock acidity and a more embodied style of playing that contrasts with the ether of the other two musicians. TDOF's first album took a long time to arrive, but it was the better to master its balance. And it's a success.