Traveling Band Mezcal Jazz Unit

• 1 Ural Nostalgia 07:19
• 2 Borobudur Sunrise 06:42
• 3 Rush Hour 05:57
• 4 Siebzehn 04:00
• 5 Road to Baruipur 05:07
• 6 Chocolate Caliente 05:13
• 7 She Who Watches 06:44
• Total Runtime 41:02

Info for Traveling Band

The tracks on this new album by the Mezcal Jazz Unit evoke places we have travelled through on our tours around the world. Seven tracks associated with countries as endearing and different as Indonesia, Vietnam, Germany, Russia, India, the USA, Central America...

This is the 13th album of Mezcal Jazz Unit. The idea was born during the successive confinements that forced us to cancel our planned tours and interrupted our artistic collaboration projects with foreign musicians for two years. It is therefore an immobile journey that we propose here through original creations never recorded before.

Christophe Azema, baritone- and soprano saxophone
Jean Marie Frédéric, guitar
Emmanuel de Gouvello, fretless bass
Daniel Solia, drums

MEZCAL JAZZ UNIT
was founded in 1986 in Montpellier and is led by the bass player and composer, Emmanuel de Gouvello. The music reflects the singular and diverse identity of the group and its relevance to current European jazz streams.

MEZCAL JAZZ UNIT'S music is defined by the Mediterranean temperament of its musicians, the reminiscences of traditional melodies, an unabashed attraction for the Orient, a rock like energy and a sense of humor. The music goes from cool and reflective to joyous and explosive connecting to the audience with rare complicity.

MEZCAL JAZZ UNIT has performed in the following countries: France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Romania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and USA.

Creative jazz projects were born from their travels and encounters with talented musicians from Eastern Europe, India, Asia, Africa or USA. Four of their ten albums are collaborations with some of these gifted artists, such as Bickram Ghosh the renowned tabla maestro with whom the group released the album, “ One,” in 2008 on the famed Saregama label. A second album will be recorded in 2018 as part of a new creative project with Bickram Ghosh including a tour in India and France organized by the French Cultural Services.

Two of their current projects are set in Asia with traditional musicians from Cambodia and Vietnam, the later featuring UNESCO designated gong players from Vietnam’s Central Highlands. For these projects Emmanuel de Gouvello arranges and composes melodies taking into consideration the specificity of the traditional instruments. The longest running collaboration, begun in 2011 with Native American musician and educator, Grayhawk Perkins has had seven tours to date in the USA and France. This cultural and educational project represents Mezcal Jazz Unit’s commitment to education and cultural diversity through music.

But above all, MEZCAL JAZZ UNIT is a quartet that excels in live performances with the expertise and generosity of the musicians and the compositions that resonate with the composer’s myriad experiences from both" ici et ailleurs ", (here and afar.) A notion captured in the title of their last album of the same name.

This album contains no booklet.