Nicolas Genest: Danhomey Songs

Danhomey Songs is French-Beninese trumpeter Nicolas Genest's first record as leader since 2015. Despite a voraciously prolific career working with just about every Francophone master working today, but specifically under the tutelage of Aldo Romano and Henri Texier, he has only produced a handful of recordings as bandleader. Perhaps it is the personages he usually finds himself supporting, the idiosyncratic duo of Romano and Texier or titanic conductors like Terence Blanchard and Wynton Marsalis, or the simple fact of his youth impeding on producers' preferences for a reliable master at the helm. Regardless, the lack of recordings is unfortunate, doubly so because his play-style is so strangely seductive, betraying a panoply of difficult, seemingly contradictory influences, all battling under a contentious harmony.

Thankfully, then, Danhomey Songs delivers, and with uncommon gusto. More than an exploration of influence and multi-nationality, Genest indulges in an invocation of the spirits. His compositions rely heavily on gentle, traditional vocal phrases, backed up by his own melodic crooning and an elegant string section. Compositionally, one can trace a gradual chronology in between tracks; from the most bare and analogue folk song in "Guede Houssou" to the classical "Bahiana Africana" and finally the electric "Gbeto," the album simmers through some couple centuries of musicology in plaintive, nostalgic ghost-forms. Almost all tracks follow this general structure, occasionally reevaluated through the accompaniment of guest stars John Clayton, Chris Potter or Lionel Loueke.

For a record as highly orchestrated as this one, Genest maintains a delicate buoyancy in the most minute improvisations. The strings are often frustratingly ambient, as if taken from airport waiting room speakers or on-hold jingles, but placed against the off-kilter dynamism of Genest's horn, one imagines a quartet randomly dropped into a rollicking, sensuous environment. All accompaniment is organized this way, a constant reconfiguring of the tone of the piece, from epic to bawdy and back again. In "Midougbe Kpowoun," Potter's sax begins in slow, dripping croons, melancholic and bare, before suddenly aggravating into boppy licks and quick progressions, mostly prompted by the illusory vocal changes, like a phantom, carefully driving the performers' movements without their knowledge. Loueke, too, is thwarted and challenged by the unpredictable vocal section. His guitar is made temporarily omnidirectional, a highly acoustic trembling. In the middle of the track, he sounds almost pleasantly lost, surrounded by drowsy, ECM-esque droning, and surrendering to it before the return to frantic rejoicing.

In Danhomey Songs, Genest has developed a profoundly researched bildungsroman, the hypnotic story of a sporadically refined sound coming into maturity. He neither dwells in the lukewarm waters of self-seriousness nor considers any emotion lightly, but carries every note with hallucinatory intensity. His horn bellows with the unbridled belief of the fanatic, and yet an excitable generosity, too, a desire to leave no stone unturned, no sound outside his scope, no history to go untold.