What About? brings together three experienced French jazz musicians – trombonist Christiane Bopp, double bass player Bernard Santacruz, and drummer Bruno Tocanne to their first recording together, captured at studio Le Chai in Trois Palis in February 2024.

The album offers sixteen pieces, mostly concise, contemplative, and unhurried collective free improvisations, with a few solo interludes, that highlight the trio’s strong individual voices and its immediate, deep affinity. There is no attachment to any idea or pulse, and once it is exhausted, the trio challenges itself and explores another one, often with the expansion of the sonic palette of their instruments, and without being shy of surrealist expressions. Tocanne observed that the three musicians developed their own discourse while remaining very attentive to the others, and allowed themselves to be guided by their emotions, dreams, and joys, but also their anger and indignation.

French avant-jazz drummer and music critic Luc Bouquet witnessed the first time this trio played together, eight months before the recording, and was present during the studio session, and he notes its egoless and generous, non-conformist and free dynamics. You can sense it immediately with the free drumming of Tocanne and the trio’s conversational, poetic interplay. The trio’s deep listening becomes an art in its own right. Bouquet concludes that the trio seized time and «turned it upside down to offer it the grace of another temporality, one in which sweets cannot be bartered».

Eyal Hareuveni  

Christiane Bopp (trombone), Bernard Santacruz (double bass), Bruno Tocanne (drums)