Erik Truffaz

NEW ALBUM (MARCH 2023) : ROLLIN'
Blue Note Records

Erik Truffaz - trumpet
Marcello Giuliani - bass
Alexis Anérilles - keyboards
Raphaël Chassin - drums
Matthis Pascaud - guitar

French-Swiss trumpeter Erik Truffaz is undeniably one of the most brilliant musicians of his generation. A prime world jazz reference, his style is often compared to that of Miles Davis, and his music is driven by fusion and sonic discovery. Erik Truffaz will release his 17th album, ‘Roll’. With this new project, Truffaz revisits and adds his unique touch to some of the greatest musical pieces of the golden age of cinema, including ‘La Casse’ starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, ‘La Strada’ directed by Fellini, ‘One Silver Dollar’ featuring Marilyn Monroe. A track list full of moving, recognisable melodies that made us dream, laugh and cry. 

It all began one festival night, Angoulême. The idea was for Erik Truffaz to un-play film music. Soundtracks are a delicate affair for musicians. They represent the skin of a film, its ill-defined soul; and in the worst screenplays they can constitute only decors for sentiments and feelings, and do hardly more than elevate the story. So Truffaz went off to rummage through his film-fan memories, his souvenirs from when he sat in a darkened cinema as a child or a teenage lover, and he organised this jazz tribute to the celluloid that it illuminates.

Something is evident right from the first piece. For Roll, Truffaz and his sidekick from almost way back when, Marcello Giuliani (they coproduced the album, which is as much as saying that this is a joint accomplishment), began by first putting down on paper a main-title that was ideal. If there’s one thing that strikes you about the career of Truffaz, it’s that casting-sense: don’t skimp on the supporting roles. Each of his records casts a troupe worthy of Marvel, with super-heroes playing textures and stylistic pile-ups. Here, in addition to the bass of Giuliani, who resorts to the acoustic variety, the group fills out with the ancient tubs of Raphaël Chassin, the land-mine keyboards of Alexis Anérilles, and the Monk-ish guitar played by Matthis Pascaud. And that’s precisely the gang that goes into town here and rearranges the portrait of a collection of photogenic music.

The plot gradually establishes itself on this record as “Erik Truffaz interfering with every film in his life.” Anyone who’s seen him onstage will understand he’s a B-movie actor himself: fedora, the body of a beanpole, you don’t know whether he’s the goodie or the baddie, but he brings drama with him wherever he blows.

His trumpet is Robert Mitchum leaving the gambling table to hoover up Marilyn Monroe with his eyes, red corset and black feathers included. She sings a silver dollar and it’s our Marilyn, Camélia Jordana, same nonchalance, same bearing, who plays her role. The trumpet of Truffaz is by turns Louis de Funès, Jean Marais, against a Fantomas masked in green who’s brooding over global destruction inside a crypt with a mechanical pipe organ.

The brass jumps from one character to another, it’s the primary voice – never has the trumpeter sung so well as in these fictional avatars. 

And so it is that this catalogue of music is not so much a lesson in films, but more a composers’ feast: Nino Rota, Michel Magne, Ennio Morricone, Alain Romans with Jacques Tati, Philippe Sarde, all the music-loving screenwriters, the geniuses of the superego whose scores massaged our imaginations. Roll has something of the freedom-fighters’ guerrilla: everywhere the group of Erik Truffaz appears, it sets the tunes free from their original function. These are no longer scores submitted to images, but miniature films that transcend the story. These are adventures that are unheard-of.