The composition Perroquets d’azur owes its existence to the oboist François Leleux who issued the commission in 1993 and gave the first performance of the work. The composition was quasi reborn when the saxophonist Nicolas Prost persuaded me to produce an arrangement for saxophone which was premiered in 2008.
In adherence to a compositional tradition which attempts to transfer a polyphonic structure to a monodic instrument and simultaneously inspired by the folkloristic music I heard on my first journeys to Cuba and Mexico, it was my intention to communicate an impression of the multifaceted complex rhythmic polyphony characterising Afro-Cuban music. The piece exploits all registers of the oboe and additionally incorporates the brief incipit of a Yoruban chant in praise of the god Changó. The music develops in an atmosphere of increasing effervescence, culminating in an intensification of the rhythmic nucleus of Afro-Cuban music: the clave.
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