Curieux de toutes les musiques et de tous les instruments - doudouk, flûtes, hulusi … Didier Malherbe a trouvé en Hadouk la formation idéale pour satisfaire sa soif d’ouverture. Ses trois compagnons le suivent à la trace dans ses échappées extra-européennes, sans jamais renoncer à l’improvisation jazz. Leur fusion singulière est toujours prometteuse de belles sensations.

Louis-Julien Nicolaou

 
Last night at the Vortex returned to London after a well received London Jazz Festival appearance in 2010. But it’s some dozen years since the band has been together as a trio and their rapport was obvious from the off. On soprano saxophone and doudouk for much of the set the latter, an “Armenian oboe”, has its own specific sound very suited to jazz, distinctive but allied to the approach of say Yusef Lateef or Charles Lloyd and with percussion flavours at times bringing Trilok Gurtu’s music to mind.

“World jazz” and post-psychedelic prog jazz however are the natural domain of Hadouk, which has a good deal of collective improvising possibilities. Hadouk manage to capture the flavours of the near east, and at the same time inhabit a mysterious musical space that does not rely on location at all. Their latest album Air Hadouk came out last year and allows a great glimpse of what they’re about. Ehrlich, switching between keyboards and the hajouj (gnawa) bass guitar on his lap, conjured up some individual keyboard sounds with some augmented mid-keyboard harmonies that linked across to Malherbe who responded with some finely judged responses especially on soprano saxophone.  

While the first set saw the momentum increase in places to a point where subtlety could have been lost, you could easily feel danceable hippie rhythms were breaking out organically, and that the audience was picking up on the carefully paced development of the long, loping lines that never outstayed their welcome. ‘Baldamore’ was a highlight, as was the link in an extended episode to traditional Irish music. Malherbe charmingly talked a little to the audience, explaining his unusual instrument the doudouk, and the Paris-based ex-Gong musician also broke into ‘Round Midnight’, a tantalising soupçon of the great Monk tune that goes all the way back to the early days of bebop, a nod to the generations of jazz musicians who have grown up with the great standard, and who continue to find new ways of interpreting it.
Stephen Graham  http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com