French Jazz sextet Asynchrone reimagine legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's repertoire
As fans of the maestro’s work, French free jazz/electro collective Asynchrone began to interrogate his oeuvre in 2020, aiming to get inside his music, taking it to unexplored new dimensions. On their debut album 'Plastic Bamboo', they achieve that and more. With a wildly eclectic approach in mind, there will be songs that most will be familiar with: ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s ‘Behind The Mask’, in particular. And then there are the deeper cuts from Sakamoto’s solo albums from the early eighties that are less famous but that nevertheless helped to expand and augment the genre. They take a varied selection of his music in a direction where free jazz meets electronics, with a sense of liberty and freedom.
Asynchrone’s personnel is a link-up between founders cellist Clément Petit, producer and musician Frédéric Soulard (behind Jeanne Added’s Victoires De La Musique-winning album), alongside clarinet/saxophone player Hugues Mayot, flautist Delphine Joussein, pianist Manuel Peskine, and Vincent Taeger (Oumou Sangaré, Tony Allen) on drums.
Plastic Bamboo teems with vivacity and possibility, and it’s a record that is future-facing rather than any kind of sombre eulogy. It seeks to continue the musical conversation now that the architect is no longer with us. Asynchrone plays Sakamoto.
