When jazz is a game

There's a character that Geneva's AMR (Association pour la musique improvisée) would have had to invent if he didn't exist: Claude Tabarini. The life of this collective of musicians unfolds through the reading of Playing jazz and listening to the music offered on the site www.claudetabarini.chwhere you can hear all the musical expeditions he talks about in the book.

Claude Tabarini is a composer, drummer, pianist and resistance fighter living in a small house in the middle of the courtyard of Ilot 13, one of Geneva's most famous squatter settlements. As he puts it, his Jouer au jazz is a "sociological and musical testimony" that revolves around his home and the AMR, on the other side of the station. With the author now in his seventies, we read and hear how he collaborated over forty years with an impressive number of the venue's players on improvised, mostly offbeat, adventures. Since we have to choose, we'll start at random with the beginning, that of "Opéra Taba", which he and Laurent Peradotto (trumpet, piano, flute, percussion, voice) offered in his one-room apartment to "some lost couple to whom they were offering tea" in 1979. And we can't resist making the leap to a recording in the - famous - company of Steve Lacy (saxophone), Jean-Jacques Avenel (double bass) and Maurice Magnoni (saxophone) in 1984. The credits on this anthology include former AMR members, such as double bassists Olivier Magnenat and Jacques Siron, and pianist Jacques Demierre. But there are also young musicians, such as saxophonist Manuel Gesseney and pianist Thomas Florin. Claude Tabarini not only plays music, he also plays words. Just look at some of the titles of his many bands: "Les cookies bleus du roi Ferdinand", "Jean-Bernard le flic", "Jazz for elegant people". And there's no shortage of splendors, oddities and extravagances to savor, leaving you impressed by the creative force of this association of musicians from the end of the lake.

Claude Tabarini: Jouer au jazz, 112 p., Fr. 20.00, Éditions Héros-Limite, Genève 2022, ISBN 978-2-88955-066-1