Michel Portal

Mp85 Michel Portal

This record was made in very peculiar conditions, after two long months of lockdown. With the members of my new quintet, we met up in the Label Bleu studios, eager to play music but with mixed feelings of joy, fear of the virus and unvoluntary distrust of the other one suddenly thrown back to their state of "menacing stranger".

It is this fundamental opening gesture which, in my opinion, gives this record's music its colour and its direction - similar to a slow return to life. What we have tried there, all together, was to go back to the momentum and freedom from care that playing comes from, the simple joy of sharing the moment in its most vivid and potent: this ability that music has, when it is taken seriously with enough casualness, to tear down all the walls that may rise between us!