the essential
Bringing together around a piano a young prodigy from Toulouse with classical training, Constant Despres, and a living legend of Cuban jazz, Rolando Luna, is to invent the magical and irresistible duo that melted hearts all summer.
The adventure began… in a tile store. When Stéphane Despres, Toulouse glory of the 1980s (Images, Pacifique…) goes to the checkout, the seller informs him that a “great Cuban pianist” has just been released. “You should contact him, I think he wants to meet you.” Always happy to talk about music, Stéphane welcomes Rolando Luna, Cuban jazz star – he accompanied the Buena Vista Social Club for 10 years – to his home. Rolando meets Constant, who has just turned 18 and who has already lost count of the awards and prizes piling up on his mantelpiece. Rolando appreciates a family of musicians. The rest, he tells it himself: “It was a wonderful family, who welcomed me with open arms. Right away, it clicked!”
“Extraordinary maturity”
The meal is excellent, the atmosphere is great and, after dessert, we move on to the piano. And there, Rolando hallucinates: “Constant has crazy talent and he combines his youth with great mastery. At his age, he shows extraordinary maturity, and I’m not just talking about the musician: he’s a young man very intelligent, astonishingly modest and simple.”
The idea of creating a duo cannot be said: it is imposed and each person brings their talent and their musicality to the other. “It’s important for a musician to enrich himself with other ways of seeing music,” observes Constant. “In the way of interpreting a piece, in the freedom that we can grant ourselves, Rolando has greatly helped me learned. The rhythm of Cuban jazz, for example, is very elaborate. He plays with a lot of passion and that’s what makes the difference between the good ones… and the very good ones!
By combining classical and jazz, Constant discovers the joy of inventing music “on the spot”: “There is more freedom in jazz than in classical music. Rolando can thus just discover the standard that the we’ll play a few hours later and the set-up will be done on the spot. It’s a very interesting approach.”
The meeting of Bach and Chick Corea
The young man also brought a lot to the legendary Cuban, who one might have thought had nothing more to learn: “Our differences, in age, in experience, in horizons, enrich us both , enthuses the latter. Constant’s analysis of the works, his understanding of music, amaze me and teach me a lot about the work of music. He has an approach that is both very humble and very profound. work he is about to perform, and it fascinates me.”
The duo has already performed around twenty times in concert and we can applaud them on October 25 at the Scènes Musicales de Lafrançaise (Tarn-et-Garonne), on November 22 in Lavaur (Tarn) for “Pastel en Scène” and on December 7 at Château St Jacques D’albas (Aude). And that’s not all! The first echoes, and chords, of a recording which has just been completed augur wonders to come… For now, head to the video platforms to discover the duo Rolando & Constant, and savor the complicity of two virtuosos who orchestrate the explosive meeting of classical and jazz, of Bach and Chick Corea. A treat!
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