Sandro Roy - Souvenir De Paris (2018)

The print media wasted no time upon release of his debut album, “Where I Come From”. The German news weekly Der Spiegel: “Fabulous start for a mega-talent.” NEUE MUSIKZEITUNG, a trade magazine for the music biz, voted it Debut of the Month, and “Münchner Konzertgesellschaft”, a non-profit association famed for promoting classical music and now Jazz as well, awarded him its Jazz Incentive Prize. Numerous appearances, for instance at the Rheingau Musik Festival or at ‘hot’ Jazz clubs throughout Germany, had audiences thundering for more.

Two years later this young violinist is now returning with a project devoted to France as its thematic focus: amazingly mature and conceptually coherent in the choice of content, yet sparkling with facets that surprise again and again. “Souvenir De Paris”, the title track, one of his own compositions and a very poetic dedication to the city that, in his opinion, “has inspired so many musicians,” readily demonstrates that the lyrical tone of this young man from a small city in southern Germany has ripened to global sophistication. It seems only natural that the great French musicians and composers such as Michel Legrand, Babik Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli have inspired him. Yet interestingly enough, it’s the younger Jazz generation that spurs him on to thrillingly new interpretations, musicians like Michel Petrucciani and Richard Galliano.

For this album he chose the members of the Jermaine Landsberger Trio as accompanists. Landsberger, who like Roy stems from a Sinti family, supports the violin player with a number of arrangements and distinguishes himself via solo work on the piano as the perfect counterpart to Sandro Roy’s playing. Very special highlights are set by two more guest artists with established ‘names’ in French-speaking regions: Marcel Loeffler, a blind accordion-player who can be heard together with Sandro Roy as a duo on the French classics “Tendre Reve” and “Paris Violon”, and together with the trio on the Richard Galliano composition entitled “Waltz For Nicky”. Such tracks are followed by breathtaking moments playing with Roby Lakatos, a highly esteemed violinist in classical circles, where dizzyingly divine dialogs arise on Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face The Music And Dance” and “Gipsylogy”.

“Souvenir De Paris” underscores Sandro Roy’s rare gift for picking and choosing from sources in classical music and Jazz in a remarkable way, for allowing his music to become a stand-alone cosmos marked by virtuoso performance, and all that on what may very well be the most difficult instrument of all, the violin.