While jazz performers have often ventured into the cover of pop songs, in particular many Beatles titles, inspiration from the rock repertoire is less common. As if the groups with electric guitars with tense, heavy rhythms, allowed less to marry the two genres than the more fluid aspect, with the melodic valorization, brought by pop. We therefore welcome the release of the album Back to Heaven by vibraphonist Franck Tortiller, an exciting and successful return to arrangements of compositions by the British group Led Zeppelin, often presented as the symbolic formation of the early days of the hard-rock movement.
In 2005, the music of Led Zeppelin had already been on the program of the National Jazz Orchestra (ONJ) which Tortiller had directed until 2008 – a record, Close to Heaven testified. “I had complete freedom from the institution. Rather, it was jazz musicians who were skeptical, telling me that we mightn’t tackle that, remembers Franck Tortiller. And already, I had the idea to come back. » At the beginning of 2021, things are taking shape: Tortiller thinks regarding the repertoire, puts together the orchestra with Miles Davis’s phrase in mind, “who said that the first job of a jazz composer is to choose which musicians you want to play with”and his ten-year experience in the Vienna Art Orchestra of Mathias Rüegg, who arranged his ensemble according to the programs.
“With the ONJ, they were performers of my generation. There, apart from the drummer and singer Patrice Héral and me who are fifty-somethings, there are some thirty-somethings. I wanted to see how they might appropriate this music with different artistic stories. » If the first album had put aside the use of the electric guitar, in this second chapter, it is present, played by Matthieu Vial-Collet. “But not in a mirror effect, of redundancy compared to Jimmy Page. I asked him to go into sound, looking for climates. But it has here and there a solo part way guitar hero. »
Tribute to John Bonham
It is rather the wind section (Olga Amelchenko and Maxime Berton, saxophones, Gabrielle Rachel Barbier-Hayward, trombone, Joël Chausse, trumpet) that is responsible for evoking the guitar riffs. On the double bass was preferred the use of the electric bass, played here by Jérôme Arrighi. “I built a lot around Patrice Héral’s drums, his creative universe, which he also brings to the voice”, Tortiller explained. As a tribute to drummer John Bonham, whose death in 1980 put an end to Led Zeppelin.
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