Abrazo (“embrace”), the new duo album from renowned French musicians Émile Parisien (soprano sax) and Vincent Peirani (accordion), is rooted in the tango; its elegance, melancholy, rhythms and nostalgia. Before recording Abrazo, Parisien and Peirani performed over 600 shows worldwide. “It's like a marriage,” says Vincent, of Émile, “with ups and downs, but what could be more normal?  Right now, we really want to play together.” 

The album reimagines the music of South American masters Astor Piazzolla, Tomás Gubitsch and Xavier Cugat, alongside two of their favorite artists, Kate Bush (“Army Dreamers”) and Jelly Roll Morton (“The Crave”). Abrazo is the follow up to the duo’s 2014 debut, Belle Époque (ACT Music), a tribute to the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. 

The duo has performed over a thousand times in major concert halls, festivals and classical venues like the Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, and Vienna Philharmonic societies. International prizes soon followed: the Echo Music Award for Jazz from the Deutsche Phono-Akademie, the German Record Critics’ Award, and for Vincent, a three-time recipient of Les Victoires du Jazz, the most prestigious jazz award in France. “…Vincent Peirani has emerged as an important advocate for the accordion,” writes Downbeat.   “He gloriously illustrates that in the right practitioner’s hands, an instrument can break free of any pigeonholing and be effective in a diverse array of settings.”

Émile Parisien received his Victories du Jazz award in 2016, and has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis on Émile’s album, Sfumato Live in Marciac. Le Monde in France calls him “the best new thing that has happened in European jazz for a long time.”

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