Alexis Valet Quintet

MANHATTAN MARATHON @ BITTER END

Friday, January 12, 2024

Vibist Alexis Valet did not choose jazz out of nostalgia but out of a thirst for action. This is a sign of his generation which, born after the departure of most of the genre's "founding fathers", continues to see this music as a space for exploration. Carried by the desire to find his voice, at a moment when his instrument returns to the front of the stage, he reveals himself to be an accomplished musician, with a confident personality, frank gesture and clear intentions, who plays jazz without hesitation. If we find in his playing a sense of lines inherited from the school of Lennie Tristano, a phrasing punctuated by the accentuations of Jackie McLean's be-bop, or if his path goes through the harmonic sinuosities of Wayne Shorter, it is is that it was nourished by the art of those who came before it. His music is equally marked, however, by Caribbean rhythms, the grooves of old-school hip-hop productions or contemporary pop, which anchor "Explorers" in the sound of our time. Is it because he hesitated for a long time with a career as a high-level athlete that Alexis Valet has both momentum in phrasing, a sense of attack and trajectory and a taste for gesture that hit the mark?

After studying percussion at the age of four, his vocation as a musician gave way for a time to his talents as a handball player, to the point that he interrupted his musical studies for a semi-professional sports career. Jazz, discovered through Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis, nevertheless imposed itself again, to the point of pushing him to enroll at the Bordeaux Conservatory at the age of 22, and to obtain there his diploma.

Involved in many projects carried by the new generation of hexagonal, eclectic and international jazz, Alexis Valet, at age 30, was part, among other formations, of the quintet of Martinican pianist Maher Beauroy, of the LINK collective with Tony Tixier, of the group Pitakpi by Martinican pianist Xavier Belin, the quintet of Israeli saxophonist Shauli Einav or the sextet of Italian drummer Francesco Ciniglio.