SAN ('three' in Japanese) was born of the meeting of three musicians of Japanese origin but from very different generations and musical cultures (pianist Sakoto Fujii, from Tokyo; marimba and vibraphone player Taiko Saito, Berlin-based; and percussionist Yuko Oshima, living in Strasbourg). Their idea was to use these differences to create a common discourse, less concerned with resolving latent conflicts than with integrating their dynamics into an ever-threatened harmony. The trio's compositions play on the strong contrasts between moments of near silence, where the slightest gesture takes on a striking relief, and collective surges of power full of tumult and tangled rhythms, developing music that is at once theatrical, choreographic and fascinating.

This concert represents the release of the album HIBIKI on the label Jazzdor Series.

James Brandon Lewis, just 40, is certainly one of today's saxophonists whose style, at once thoughtful and tumultuous, best embodies and synthesises the contribution of the great Moderns to contemporary jazz. His huge, sinuous sound, over which hovers the shadow of Albert Ayler in the way it transfigures the influences of Gospel and Soul and a phrasing admirably articulated in the manner of Sonny Rollins but animated by a breath and a lyrical fever that can only evoke the latest Coltrane. It is probably in leading of this impressively cohesive quartet, propelled by a rhythm section admirably controlling flows of energy, that the saxophonist displays the full extent of his talent, in a music that is both impulsive and erudite, thus offering a new lease of life to free jazz.