Twins [TB#0] | October 2017, France

Symmetry makes all asymmetries possible (and vice versa): here, two saxophones with butterfly propellers, rocket elytra, two drums diversified to the point of turning any surface into magical mirrors. In the beginning, Fred Jackson and Stéphane Payen, Edward Perraud and Frank Rosaly met at the Chicago Cultural Center, one fine day in April 2013, for the North American launch of The Bridge. They met again in Paris, in June 2015, to put everything back into play and record. Since then, the double-crossed quartet has become Twins and Makaya McCraven alternates with Frank Rosaly behind the drums, and all around. Together, they make light of both gravity and weightlessness – this time, and at last, across France.

Imagine a synchronized plunge off the cliff of saxophones and drums. Imagine divers slowed down by their somersaults and twists, as if these cascading figures eventually formed an invisible scaffolding and stabilized themselves in space. As if falling bodies were a construction technique. All the duos and quartets are present in Twins (but very few odd ones, very few solos or trios), all the figures, tocades and roulades, are present. Sagittarius saxophonists and trapeze drummers assist or challenge each other in their respective tasks, passing relay after relay. Sagittarius Payen with trapeze artist McCraven, or trapeze artist Perraud with sagittarius Jackson. Sometimes the drums set up camp, leaving the saxophonists free to come and go, to reconnoitre: the stewardship follows, even if it means smuggling rhythms. Gears are shifted up and down. Sometimes the drummers frolic in contradictory velocities, while the saxophones stitch together long, more or less piercing lines. It’s obvious that their understanding (their ability to multiply) is based on arithmetic and arrhythmia: the drummers’ breaks and shatters, the blowers’ axes and crosshatching, their sense of continuity and discontinuity. Sagittarians and trapeze artists are geometricians in disproportion.