Les Égarés is more than a record. It’s play space, a locus of musical life, a poetic asylum inhabited by two twosomes who for years have excelled in the art of cross-fertilising sounds and transcending genres. They are Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Vincent Segal (cello) on the one hand and Vincent Peirani (accordion) and Émile Parisien (sax) on the other. In the case of these magicians, 2 + 2 no longer makes 4, it makes 1. Because what they concoct is most definitely a unity of spirit, a single and fluid sound that disdains all forms of egotistical competitiveness and puts each participant at the service of a common musical good. Neither jazz, nor trad, nor chamber, nor avant-garde, but a bit of all of them, all at once. Les Egarésis is the kind of album that makes the ear the king of all instruments, an album where virtuosity expresses itself in the art of complicity, where the simple and grandiose idea of listening to one another results in the birth of a splendid song with four parts.

It all started with a summit meeting –high on a hill overlooking Lyon. That night in June 2019, at Les Nuits de Fourvière Festival, everyone was preparing to celebrate the 15thanniversary of the NØ FØRMAT label in a beautiful setting of Roman stones under an open sky. Vincent Segal played the role of master of ceremonies and held a kind of musical salon, gathering together guests of choice, among whom were Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Peirani and Émile Parisien. The participants signed a pact: rehearsing must never take precedence over anything that showed signs of being a moment of spontaneous creation. That afternoon, in an arbour that shielded them from the hot sun, they started to jam, just for the beauty and pleasure of it, and the music just flowed like a spring, fresh and limpid. It was the memory of this spontaneous outpouring that gave rise to the idea of forming a quartet of Egarés (‘those who have gone astray’). And that’s what the recording of the album felt like too: a spontaneous sharing of impulse and know-how. From the first notes, everything was volatile, in motion, vibrating. It’s those irresistibly cadenced melodies that buzz inside you when, according to Vincent Segal, ‘you walk without knowing where you’re going, letting yourself drift and giving into the pleasure of being lost,’–a pleasure that, all on its own, aptly sums up the philosophy of this record.

Without any showiness, the four accomplices pull off a whole series of exploits that are never advertised as such. Les Egarés is a record without solo voice that never stops singing; a record without drums or percussion that never stops enabling a very human and very delicate pulse to be heard. A record of interactions so harmonious that, in certain sequences, the ear, gripped by certain auditory illusions (isn’t there a balafon in there somewhere? And a harmonium over there?), manages to lose itself voluptuously, no longer able to distinguish who’s doing what in the intimate interlacing of the separate voices. It’s a record that, whilst keeping banality at bay, never stops embracing the obvious, the art of compassionate ‘unframing’ and voluntary drifting, whose audacious elegance evokes other great drifters like Don Cherry, or those musicians with no ID from Penguin Café Orchestra. ‘I’ve never recorded an album in such an atmosphere’, says Vincent Peirani. ‘None of us were ‘performing’, so much so that the music communicates a lot without ever having to “tell” it. None of us possessed the truth beforehand: all we did is find it together.’