New Origin – EN

NEW ORIGIN

EXPLOSIVE FRENCH-AMERICAN TRIO

NEW ALBUM 2025

ALBUM RELEASE : « A Poet’s Walk »

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LISTEN AND BUY THE ALBUM ON BANDCAMP

<a href="https://sluchaj.bandcamp.com/album/the-poets-walk">The Poet’s Walk // New Origin feat. Christophe Rocher – Joe Fonda – Harvey Sorgen</a>

They talk about the album :

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Friendship as a principle

A superb case, like a quiver. Inside: magnificent clarinets. That’s all it took for Joe Fonda, passing through Brest (France), to invite their owner to play with him on his next visit to the US. After all, anyone who owns these beautiful instruments “can really play”. And that’s how New Origin began.

From the very first bars of Vers le soir, the double bass leaps onto the springboard, cast by an urgent call from the drumsticks. Urgency, energy, decisiveness – it all comes from far away, from almost forty years of making music together, shared by Joe Fonda and Harvey Sorgen, continues in a wide range of contexts. In his brief introductory solo, Joe Fonda establishes this equation of rhythm and melody in a register all of his own: firm, discursive, eloquent, and always stretching forward. And what follows is the song. Christophe Rocher’s bass clarinet is a blossoming of everything that was already present in the opening bars : their thrust becomes voluble and their rigorous construction a scaffolding for what now bursts forth – timbres, colours, registers: joy.

The music is reformulated several times – a swinging march drawn from the crackle of a snare drum; a brassy passage like a sunset, a rising of gongs; a tender confession, abandoned and trusting – as if, always, in these often nested pieces, one obvious trruth conceals another, with no time limit, and with the need to de concerned about it.

As in the poem by François Cheng, whose verses are reflected in the progrram, it’s as though we have a « double destiny » : an unwavering presence in the here and now and a longing for a distant elsewhere. These are two sides of the same condition : our own and, particularly, that of the improvisers. This quality of “inhabitiing the heart of the landscape” is what gives strength to this music, as fully and deeply rooted in the moment, as it is stretcched toward what is to come, “beckoning to the shooting stars”, luminous, swift, elusive.

The ancient Greeks had a concept that allowed them to link moral concepts – loyalty, sincerity – and ethical and political ones – freedom, mutual assistance – to a cosmogony governed by harmony : that of philia (4>tÀ[a), which can be loosely translated as “friendship”. New Origin is all that. Philia draws “all beings towarrd all beings” (Iamblichus). So it is with Christophe Rocher, Joe Fonda and Harvey Sorgen, and with their songs, densely present yet always open, which together create the musical image of a joyful cosmogony governed by philia: friendship, the principle of a new beginning.

Philippe Levreaud (tr.: Jeanette Parr)

Recorded Nov 14, 2023 by Jay Anderson at Mountain Rest Studio’s. New Paltz, NY.
Mixed May 24, 2024 by Kenan Trevien at 6.35 Studio – Brest, France

Enregistré le 17 Mars 2025 à l’Armorica de Plouguerneau.

PRESENTATION

Finding the trace, taking the path, linking the beginning to the horizon to be better carried to the depths of the present. The NEW ORIGIN TRIO makes space-time vibrate through a free and colorful music linking the United States to Europe, learned music and wild freedom.

On one side, clarinettist Christophe Rocher has spent 30 years playing jazz in Europe and the USA, developing a melodic language that is totally atypical, poetic and explosive.

On the other, two American musicians, Joe Fonda and Harvey Sorgen. They have collaborated with Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Barry Altchul, Dave Douglas, Oliver Lake, Hot Tuna, Brenda Bufalino, Karl Berger, Ahmad Jamal and many others. Joe Fonda was voted Musician of the Year 2023 by New York Jazz Record. These two develop a unique universe that resolutely links these unstable times to the mad freedom of this music.

With financial support of DRAC Bretagne, Région Bretagne, Conseil Départemental du Finistère, Ville de Brest, Sacem, Henri Selmer and JLV Sound Paris.