CYRIL ACHARD TRIO – Trace

The Cyril Achard Trio is a French Jazz trio led by guitarist Cyril Achard. A popular trend of late, especially for Jazz Fusion-inspired bands, is to record a live performance with a minimal amount of takes and post-recording tweaking. Achard comments, “My goal was to make a live recording with less takes as possible, we recorded the audio CD just by playing each song two times maximum and no overdubs were done.” It’s under this premise that Cyril Achard is releasing their latest endeavor as a CD/DVD double pack. The CD side, Trace, portrays the trio in their purely acoustic mode while the DVD part of the package supposedly has some electric moments mixed in.

The audio CD version of Trace is only 36 minutes long from end-to-end and encompasses five tracks total with all of the song titles in French. Unfortunately, what’s presented on this CD will for the most part be irrelevant to most Metal Express Radio listeners as the acoustic-based Jazz comes across sounding very “Smooth Jazz”-like.

What you’ll find here is New Age acoustic Jazz with percussion played with hands, in one case “a” drum, and bass tones that sound produced by an upright bass. There is no drum kit or electric guitars to be found, period. “L’ inexistence”, for example, has a very dark melody with nice mid-range bass tones. “Arabesque” is also acoustic with a nice Arabian-Spanish flair to it.

This pretty much paints the picture for this five track audio supplement to a larger combo package. The music is definitely well-executed, but is the wrong tone for the majority of this station’s listeners. For those with a more sophisticated taste, Trace will serve very well as background dinner music for a mixed, non-Metal crowd.

Lineup

Cyril Achard – Acoustic and Electric Guitars
Lilian Bencini – Bass
Fred Pasqua – Drums