"Solo percussion album by Luc Bouquet in homage to his father Jean who was a ballroom and jazz drummer a long time ago. During the Second World War, Jean Bouquet played in clandestine balls in the harsh years of the Occupation once the Wehrmacht... and the Gestapo had invaded the territory of so-called "Free" France in November 1942. It was at risk. of their freedoms and even their lives that Jean Bouquet and his friend Severin the accordionist went to the villages of the Alpilles to host a Clandestine Ball inside a mas (a farm), the instruments hidden in the bags of the motorbike. And this from the village of Maussane near Fontvieille. Jean was also resistant. The pieces recorded solo evoke the places and villages crossed by the two friends: Le Carre Rond, Le Castellas, Les Gipieres, Les plaines de Lauziere. These are places that our friend has traveled since his early childhood, his mother leading him to discover Neolithic or Gallo-Roman sites in the Alpilles, sometimes at the top of the "montagnettes". The first piece "Preparatifs" makes us hear Luc blowing into a harmonica, undoubtedly to remember the accordion of Severin, his father's brother-in-arms.

The Carre Rond is played with a cymbal and a guitar string (?) fixed and stretched on a wooden spar which rubs its edges, making the vibration of the cymbal and its harmonics hiss, screech and undulate. Intimate sound reflection which well illustrates all the delicacy of feeling of the musician and his ability to carefully vary his effects with this technique. With Le Castellas, the drummer plays drums with a great quality of touch and strike, a sense of musical breathing which clearly indicates his level of experience as an improviser and the natural intuition of appropriate dynamics . No effects and impressive "figures", but a concentration on the essential: musicality, lyrical quality and a certain sense of construction. We find all these qualities in the following piece, Les Gipieres, the centerpiece of this deep and luminous music. He introduces interesting figures and shapes by linking them together with as much drum science as taste, and this for 18:44. A real performanceand a feeling of freedom! The plains of Lauzieres provide yet another perspective where the friction on the skin of the body takes on its full meaning. There is obvious sensitive generosity in his playing and what is not there is aimless tension, breathing, the ulterior motive of wanting to show off. Music that is both earthy and aerial. A philosophy of life as if practicing the drums makes a man better at the deepest level of his being. And, once the Clandestine Ball is over and the bottles have been emptied, we must return over hill and dale to the house where, transfixed, Lulu, Luc Bouquet's mother, was waiting for him. This is what Retour evokes with the final harmonica sound which gradually fades away in the silence of the night. Frankly, if I played the trumpet, the sax or the double bass, etc. in free music of jazz essence or something else in France, I would try to call Luc Bouquet."-Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg