Chan­tal Es­delle, a Berklee Col­lege of Mu­sic grad­u­ate, holds an im­por­tant place among jazz mu­si­cians here, as she is one of the few fe­male band­lead­ers, if not the on­ly one, who is a renowned pi­anist in this is­land. She is part of a lin­eage that would prob­a­bly in­clude Winifred Atwell and, tan­gen­tial­ly, Hazel Scott.

Un­like those two artistes, Es­delle has been able to mine the mu­si­cal in­flu­ences of Trinidad and in a deep­er sense, Africa and the African di­as­po­ra in the New World for her com­po­si­tions. Fur­ther, un­like Atwell and Scott, Es­delle has a body of orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions on her two CD re­leas­es that now place her ahead of a num­ber of jazz lu­mi­nar­ies in the is­lands who still balk at re­leas­ing orig­i­nal mu­sic.

At the launch of Chan­tal Es­delle and Moyenne's sec­ond CD, Im­bi­zo Moyenne, in May 2013, there was some dis­ap­point­ment that the CD wasn't avail­able at the launch. It was avail­able dig­i­tal­ly, but many in at­ten­dance want­ed a tan­gi­ble copy of the al­bum.

There is no deny­ing that Es­delle, and by ex­ten­sion Moyenne de­serve to be heard and time has al­lowed the dis­ap­point­ment of that event to be re­placed with the joy in herald­ing this new mu­sic.

Out now in CD for­mat to sup­ple­ment the dig­i­tal ver­sion al­ready avail­able in lim­it­ed re­lease, this sim­ply-pack­aged CD fills a yawn­ing gap in the canon of lo­cal­ly-re­leased jazz mu­sic.

Im­bi­zo Moyenne rep­re­sents a call­ing to­geth­er–a gath­er­ing of minds–to cre­ate and is the fol­low-up al­bum to Moyenne's first CD, New Hope, re­leased in 2000. Con­tain­ing all-orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions by Moyenne, this al­bum's mu­sic is suf­fused with the rhyth­mic tropes of the French An­tilles and Span­ish Caribbean, as well as our fa­mil­iar ca­lyp­so, blues and shango rhythms.

Es­delle not­ed that when she was com­pos­ing, she was guid­ed by her un­der­stand­ing of the African ex­pe­ri­ence in the Amer­i­c­as. The use of the myr­i­ad rhythms of the African New World, the Caribbean was re­cent­ly ex­plored by trum­peter Eti­enne Charles in his chart-top­ping re­lease Cre­ole Soul, so the ex­ten­sion of the com­mon­al­i­ty of the peo­ple of the African di­as­po­ra to ex­press our pres­ence in unique mu­sic is ap­plaud­ed. The per­for­mances showed a con­fi­dence in the im­pro­vi­sa­tion by Es­delle on pi­ano and su­perb pan­nist, Glen­ford Sobers, Jr. Songs such as Fi­nal Farewell and Out of Thin Air show­case this ex­cel­lent­ly.

The rhythm sec­tion of Dou­glas Re­don on bass, Ju­nior Noel on djem­be and Dar­ren Shep­pard (of the Kal­abash jazz band) on drums eco­nom­i­cal­ly ex­plored the range of African-in­flu­enced puls­es.

This al­bum was record­ed live in 2010 at a con­cert at CLR James Au­di­to­ri­um in Val­sayn. It was part of the Sound Con­nec­tion Project of Es­delle's Eth­nic Jazz Club Co Ltd that en­gaged some of the top au­dio en­gi­neers from the famed EGREM record la­bel in Cu­ba.

The in­ter­play be­tween a live au­di­ence and Es­delle's band, with their im­plied nod to the en­gi­neers' her­itage, makes for son­ic treats. There is al­ways an in­her­ent risk that a live record­ing of jazz may pro­duce mu­sic that wasn't "per­fect" like a reg­u­lar stu­dio record­ing. That leap of faith is al­ways the sur­prise that con­tin­ues to sus­tain jazz mu­sic and its vari­a­tions glob­al­ly. This mu­sic will not dis­ap­pear, and nei­ther should our de­sire to own it.

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