Jazz breaking news: Erik Truffaz walks the walk at Ronnie’s
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
So powerfully yet effortlessly did Erik Truffaz connect with a well-dressed audience at Scott's on this late March evening that it was surprising to learn that he had played the club only once before, and fairly anonymously too, as part of some all-star European festival package.
Now this lyrical French trumpeter was back, fronting his well-established and highly distinctive group, and they went down like an avalanche in his native Savoy alps. In other words, very strongly. Not only was the place booked solid, but Truffaz's lyrical brand of semi-smooth probing through electronic Miles Davis dreamscapes seemed to be exactly what the customers ordered.
No doubt Monsieur Truffaz will be back soon, for there's a lot of nostalgia for the 1970s and 80s, the age when hip soloists like Davis and Chuck Mangione rode flying carpets of digital synthesisers for leisurely numbers of 20 minutes or more. Truffaz has become extremely adept at these. After nearly 20 albums and 30-odd years of trial and error, he now gets all the soundscaping he needs from a lightly digitised trio, unusually arranged onstage. Marc Erbetta's drumkit was placed stage right, facing inward toward the leader at centre stage, with Benoît Corboz's keyboards facing him from stage left and Marcello Giuliani, playing an extremely vintage Fender bass-guitar, behind him at rear centre. Truffaz, a slim figure who facially resembles both Italy's leading trumpeter Enrico Rava and the late Spike Milligan, who coincidentally also played trumpet, stands stock-still when he plays.
Whether plugging his new album, El tiempo de la Revolución, or dipping into former glories like The Walk of the Giant Turtle, his trumpet solos remained admirably graceful even at medium-up tempos, yet he kept some fast twiddly-bits in reserve for moments of peak excitement. Another tip he’d learned from Miles was the efficacy of ending a neat phrase with a discordant note, just one lonely little cry, hanging in the air as the vague promise of some interesting harmonic novelty ahead. He's a deceptively clever player.
– Jack Massarik