Erik Truffaz plays Rollin’ & Clap! at Hong Kong City Hall

Erik Truffaz—Rollin' & Clap!
French May Arts Fest
Hong Kong City Hall
Hong Kong SAR
June 7, 2025

It's easy to feel suspicious of projects too keen to tout their sales-friendly theme. Whether it's another Bird tribute or an album of Beatles songs (yup, looking at you, Brad Mehldau), the USP frequently screams so loudly it's hard not to imagine the marketer's glee (or coercion). Even a masterpiece like Herbie Hancock's The New Standard carries the stench of smart business thinking (try as he might, even HH couldn't make the harmonic doldrums of Nirvana's "All Apologies" resemble a song.)

So when Erik Truffaz inaugurated his return to Blue Note Records after 13 years in the wilderness, with not one but two, sleight-lengthed albums of movie themes, it was easy to assume the once-ever-restless French trumpeter had a commercial motive in mind. That a musician who made a name on the label with his most challenging, genre-melding work was now, a quarter century later, dialling his least challenging hand. And who would blame him? Still, my initial distracted half-listens to the two-parter of Rollin' and Clap! (both 2023, Blue Note) and suggested exactly what I feared—smooth listening from a musician in his mid-60s eager to shift units.

Until I had the chance to witness the power of this music live at Hong Kong's French May arts festival. Notably missing was guitarist Matthis Pascaud (despite being billed in the programme), which perhaps lent the extra space the ensemble needed all along. Instead of the atmospheric, Wild West Fender-twangs that litter those records, the slimmed quartet were forced to focus more tightly on groove, conjuring a thick, funky fusion stew—with electric keys and bass, and arrangements that stripped away the often rich, orchestral harmony of the cinematic source material to focus squarely on melody and rhythm.

Sparseness was weaponized, clinically. In the brief keys-backed duo intro, Truffaz's naked trumpet spelled out the aching melody of Nino Rota's theme for Fellini's La Strada with the hazy, emotive imprecision of a Chinese ink landscape, before the quartet nodded into the noir bop of "Thème De Fantômas." Already it was clear why Truffaz's husky, smokey, effervescent tone was the ideal vehicle for the concept—especially evident on Ennio Morricone's theme from Le Casse, recast as a plodding dirge, the blankest canvas for Truffaz to ring every ounce of emotion from the barest of musical bones. A local guest vocalist joined for "One Silver Dollar," from River of No Return.

Also notable was an attention to optics: with the rest of the band assembled in a semi-circle around Truffaz, the trilby-topped trumpeter theatrically deployed his tall, rakish frame to artful effect, often turning to a 90-degree angle as he bowed and brayed, recalling the silhouette of Columbia's iconic Miles Davis logo at times. Harsher critics may have chalked the 65-year-old's entire career up as a Miles homage, yet in that pure tone, in those precise ascending scale runs and hazy note flurries—and especially in those pregnant pauses between phrases—I choose to hear the sincerest form of flattery.

It was easy to hear '70s Miles in that sonic stew, too. Rock-ishly rhythmic, Marcello Giuliani employed a pick (!) to attack his bass guitar for much of the set, laying down dirty lounge-punk grooves. On tunes like the theme to L'alpagueur, Alexis Anérilles stretched out on his vintage organ, unleashing spidery runs and fiddling with effects boxes that made him sound eerily like pre-acoustic Keith Jarrett. Yet it never felt dangerous or heavy—this was fusion for the theatres of 2025.

In truth, I was not completely convinced until a mid-set rendition of "Thème de Camille," the emotional centrepiece from Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris, perhaps my favourite film, which saw Anérilles turn to the grand piano for the first time to spell out those heartbreaking arpeggios. Because as enjoyable as all that audience-clapping, theatre-sized fusion grooves were, ultimately, it was Truffaz's trumpet we came to hear—and nothing hits harder than a ballad rinsed dry.

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