Les Égarés; SISSOKO, SEGAL, PARISIEN, PEIRANI. ‘Esperanza’ (Marc Perrone) @joespub NYC 03/23/25

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Ballaké Sissoko ( on kora )
Vincent Segal ( on cello )
Émile Parisien ( on soprano sax )
Vincent Peirani ( on accordion )

Review from The Guardian 03/24/23 John Fordham

‘Émile Parisien’s soprano sax is the standout on this diverse and inventive set, which blends kora with Anatolian shindigs, klezmer with agile accordion.


When the light from one of the most ethereally spellbinding stars in the jazz firmament flickered out with the death of Wayne Shorter at 89 in 2023, the great improviser and composer left a multiplicity of ways to remember him. A tersley powerful tenor saxophonist, Shorter, like his mentor John Coltrane, cultivated a contrastingly pensive vulnerable, and even unsentimentally romantic persona with the delicately oboe-like and temperamental soprano sax.

That fickle instrument, pioneered and almost exclusively played from the 1920’s to the 50s in voice-like, vibrato-trembling tones by the New Orleans genius Sidney Bechet, was otherwise largely neglected in jazz until Dixielander turned trailblazer Steve Lacy’s postwar partnerships with Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk, and Coltrane’s My Favourite Things in 1961.

In recent years, the impish French original Émile Parisien has proven a brilliant inheritor of those soprano traditions - Bechet particularly.
He’s a permanent presence on this lyrical yet quirky quartet set.

Les Égarés means “ those who stray “, which aptly characterises genre-hoppers like Parisien, Malian kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, improvising cellist Vincent Segal and accordion virtuoso Vincent Peirani.’


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