Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio – YOU are the Song

It’s been twelve years. Twelve years since the previous album by the trio Pilc Moutin Hoenig (Jean-Michel, François and Ari), the excellent Threedom, released in 2011. But it was well worth the wait.

Just as good in terms of pure musicality and technical excellence, but perhaps more melodically focused than its predecessor, YOU Are The Song is a living framework where atmospheres expand and contract over the course of the pieces, in a shifting organicity.

YOU Are The Song is a tour de force because it was made in one go without any preparation. Somebody pressed “Record” on the console and let them go. For three hours. Enough material for 2 or 3 albums. Then YOU are the song became the visceral substance of this seance. A jazz that flourishes and is intellectually constructed at the very moment it is created. Yet such coherence emerges, such beautiful architecture, so skilful and so fully thought through. And all this while constantly revealing surprises, spontaneous ornamental asperities that seem to emerge naturally from the joists, columns and buttresses, as if Gaudi had fertilised Viollet-le-Duc with a Gehry cutting. The original pieces are a delight (with a special mention for Searing Congress, a feat that fuses three standards, What Is This Thing Called Love, Hot House and Take the Coltrane), as are the covers (Coltrane’s Impressions; Monk’s Straight No Chaser).

Three leaders/accompanists/composers/performers who take on all the roles in a fluctuating and instinctive to-and-fro, an undulating liquidity of functions that can only exist in an ensemble made up of A) great musicians, B) performers who are ultra-humble when it comes to the needs of the music and C) artists who have known each other perfectly for a long time. Pilc Moutin Hoenig is exactly that.