ECM Records VINCENT COURTOIS - WEST CD

“I feel that my music has become more precise, evolving towards an ideal point or place – great spaces, melodic silences, monumental landscapes one can travel on intimate routes, thanks to mysterious hidden maps” comments Vincent Courtois who has kept collaborating with other artists, in various discipines, be it cinema (he composed the original score for Ernest and Célestine, a César winning and Academy Award nominated animation movie), literature (Raymond Carver's America, a musical play starring Pierre Baux) or photography (Intuition, with Michael Ackerman and Christian Caujolle, Rencontres d'Arles 2014).
“Conceiving, writing and orchestrating notes, almost like they were a travel plan, has become the main axis of my work, one that I cannot do without.

A recording studio is a place like no other, these musical roads unwind and come alive”. The mythical studio La Buissonne, where Vincent Courtois has been once more invited to work, first solo with the producer and sound engineer Gérard de Haro, then with pianist Benjamin Moussay and saxophonists Daniel Erdmann and Robin Fincker, is the birth place of quite a unique record: “While we recorded and mixed it, the title kept playing in my mind, a single word, WEST, a direction, almost a decision, a resolution; a journey elsewhere, towards the unknown, and a promise of great discoveries” Vincent Courtois adds.
WEST is an important record, a testimony to the uncompromising poetic choices of a musician who has chosen to exile voluntarily, to retreat within himself in order to create great new horizons for his audience.