TiTom/Retour Au Crépuscule/Coop Breizh/2024
Personnel:
TiTom (Thomas Lotout): bombard, composer
Stéphane Rama: bass
Marcus Camus: drums
Gaëtan Grandjean: bouzouki
Yannig Alory: wooden flute
Gab Faure: violin
Invités:
Adeline Haudiquet: Vocals
Jérémie Simon: Accordéon
Néven Kernaudour, Chim Cadudal: Bagpipes
Gurvan Kerboeuf: Vielle à roue
Farid Aït Siameur: percussion
I don’t exactly, entirely, like the recordings of Thomas Lotout, AKA ’TiTom’, but nonetheless I buy every single one as soon as they come out. Why? I’m a talabarder, a bombard player, and Lotout is a historically significant, phenomenally talented, singular genius on this instrument. Listening to his tone, articulation, and dynamics is like a free music lesson every few moments for double-reed players. His bombard is always beautifully recorded as well, providing a richly detailed, intensely powerful and nuanced voice that utterly destroys any notion that the bombard can’t take its place alongside any other woodwind as a completely professional lead instrument at the highest level. This is of course entirely true for his 2024 recording, the sixth TiTom album, entitled Retour Au Crépuscule (Back to Dusk), which is the subject of this review.
’TiTom’ is, of course, more than just Lotout, and he has assembled and maintained over the course of six recordings a fairly stable lineup of absolutely rock-solid musicians including Stéphane Rama on bass, Marcus Camus on drums, Gaëtan Grandjean on electric and acoustic bouzouki, Yannig Alory on wooden flute, and the talented violinist Gab Faure providing significant melodic ‘response’ in the frequent call-and-response nature of the genre.
The ‘rock’ from rock-solid can especially be used to describe the powerful bass and drums of Rama and Camus, who could be seamlessly dropped into any prog-rock setting without blinking an eye. These two are also recorded in a crisp, ultra-modern style and are placed well forward in the mix, resulting at times in a cognitively dissonant soundscape where the traditional sounds of flute and violin are overwhelmed by the massive rock rhythm section. Filling the space between these two camps is Gaëtan Grandjean’s electric and acoustic bouzouki, where the electric sound fits perfectly into any hard-rock scenario and the acoustic sound mixes well with the flute and violin. Of course, front and center on top of all of this rides the soaring, overwhelming voice of Lotout’s bombard.
So what’s not to love? We’ll use Taghazout Kasbah - Tour, which is an Andro tune type, as an example. This piece opens with a really cool, funky driving opening section that rides along for a few measures before the bombard comes in with a lovely phrygian-mode melody that lays on the top in a very satisfying way. Wow, this is really great! Then at the two-minute mark the track suddenly shifts into an interlude: a technically impressive but melodically challenged prog-rock sort of bit that shows chops and precision in its delivery but completely breaks the vibe and leaves the listener in a state of nonplussed musical confusion. This resolves itself into the next section fairly quickly though, and the piece once again picks up some meaningful ability to engage the listener, particularly with Faure being given a solo, which is however flawed by being mixed too far back in the mix relative to the bombard and the ever-present bass and drums. It’s a critical flaw in the concept of the piece. At 3:27 we hit another vibe-killing, odd interlude which thankfully morphs back into a return to the first tune. Taghazout Kasbah encapsulates Retour Au Crépuscule’s strengths and weaknesses: some jaw-dropping parts that are both beautiful and quite wonderfully rocking, mixed with odd moments of compositional failure that come in the form of off-putting digressions or, in some cases, the forfeiture of harmonic underpinnings that results in some pieces feeling strangely untethered.
Retour Au Crépuscule is, like all of TiTom’s recordings, a strange mix of sublime and disappointing, but the not-too-infrequent flashes of brilliance in this recording are really quite brilliant.
