Rouge

Madeleine Cazenave – piano & composition
Sylvain Didou – double bass
Boris Louvet – drums, machines

“Hybrid, refined, Vermeilles elegantly alternates singular variations like so many contemplative dreams. A journey as captivating as it is addictive » Jean-Pierre Vidal – Jazz Magazine

Founded at the end of 2018 by pianist Madeleine Cazenave with bass player Sylvain Didou and drum player Boris Louvet, Rouge did not take long to carve out their place in the new French jazz landscape, as rich as it is diverse. The young trio was spotted by and integrated into the Jazz Migration program, offering them as early as 2020 the opportunity to try out on in situ the impact of their compositions on the audience, with a series of concerts; in the wake of this, they sign a first record, “Derrière les paupières” (“Behind the eyelids”), which sounds like a manifesto. It instantly makes an impact, outlining the very subtle seductions and the variations of an atmospheric, ultra-sensitive music trying to articulate a genuine quest for expressive simplicity both individually and collectively, with a consistent formal ambition, borrowed equally from classical tradition and from contemporary pop-folk.

Joining Label Bleu today, to release with “Vermeilles” a second record as ambitious as it is appealing, Rouge moves up to a new level. Even if in the main, one can find the same ingredients as in “Derrière les paupières”, the trio have unquestionably gained in maturity and in collective control. Their discourse is resolutely acoustic, but they decorate it with a subtle resort to electronics, thanks to collective arrangements highly sophisticated. There, the slightest variation in colours, in texture or dynamics results in a true work of musical scenography, redistributing the place and role of each instrument inside a composition dramaturgy always in movement. The trio thus develop some kinds of landscape-pictures in a series of compositions both atmospheric and highly melodic, with moving shapes that seize, within very precise and defined frames, the tiniest mood change of the ensemble. Going from pieces that pulse with cotonous minimalist grooves showing some sort of pop melancholy (Feu, Louves, Move in) (“Fire”, “She-wolf”, Move in) to hybrid compositions with contrasted movements, letting more or less subliminal references to classical music arise (Granit, Tempête) (“Granite”, “Tempest”), or sometimes referring to songs (the very nice Strawberries in the Dark, sung by the British folk-singer Kate Stables) – Rouge here state anew, with strength and talent, the singularity of their universe, always working towards purer fundamentals of their music both contemplative and sensory, letting us hear more than is written through a writing that is ever precise and elegant. (Text by Stéphane Ollivier).