Xavier Harry Solo
"ESSENCE OF"
It was at sixteen when he started the piano "I was bored at home. There was my sister's study piano who had lessons at the conservatory. I got into it as an autodidact." Three months later, the teenager born February 14, 1979 is on stage playing "Little Flower" at the high school party. “Old-fashioned jazz, it was explosive !" The first steps in music already tell a lot about the career of this musician. Xavier Harry also made meetings in particular with Antoine Hervé, with whom he will take a weekly lesson for six years. “I learned the excellence of the piano, a technical requirement, an awareness of sound… He opened the doors of my mind." In his sources of inspiration, one cannot miss the importance of Michel Petrucciani," the pianist who made me want to do this profession ", of Malavoi, Alain Jean-Marie, Mario Canonge or even d 'Eddy Louiss. “The latter really marked me. I took up some of his themes on stage! "
© Annie-Claire Alvoët
Twenty years after his debut, it is therefore time for this pianist to come together, to be able to recompose the puzzle of his personality. Or rather to sketch a self-portrait in the form of a solo piano. Four days in the studio, time to take care to listen to the pulse of the Fazioli 280, its eighty-eight keys in black and ivory ...
In this new album, which he considers the third part of a trilogy, the fan of Keith Jarrett asserts himself as a composer and improviser, with the same gesture. “Originally it was an eight movement suite, including two rewrites of the classics 'Whisper Not' and 'You Don't Know What Love Is'. For the record, I chose to keep the six originals. Although very written, the repertoire nevertheless leaves room for the imagination, with punctuations developed in improvised suspensions. When the left hand is deep, the right can go out of the melodic clear line, to illuminate other traits of this personality. We think of Rachmaninoff and especially of Chopin's precision, this sense of a balanced inflection, this dreamlike breath ...
By telling himself in complete privacy, by going to the depths, the pianist reveals another facet of his personality. “Melancholy represents for me a state which allows me to express deep things. It allows me to immerse myself in a world that is both sensitive and poetic. This is what emerges when I sit alone front oh the piano. I needed to express this feeling, undoubtedly linked to being uprooted, to a childhood between two worlds… a certain sadness that inhabits me". This is why he chose this title, Essence, which was inspired to him by reading Glenn Gould.
Of this word, which has different meanings, he retains the philosophical reading. “Alone in the face of music, I can immerse myself 1000% in what I am, who I am… For me, it was about going to the heart of the soul." The solo, he hears it like a dialogue with the piano, his alter go. "You become one with the music, you leave your body." Body and soul… As the most echo of this advice given during a master class of Banlieues Bleues by the Zen master of the piano that was the immense Mal Waldron. “I asked him how it was possible to integrate music into our life as a musician. He replied to me a sentence that I have never forgotten: “Music is life and life is music”. This sentence made me understand that music is also a philosophical path. More than the diminished chords, and all the technical paraphernalia, the essential is elsewhere… ”Let's call it spirituality.
© Annie-Claire Alvoët