AWAKE
was founded five years ago. This can be heard in the richness of their sound, in the manner in which the music unfolds, weaves a spell and is resolved collectively through long forms that give space to each of the musicians. AWAKE is a group as much as it is a meeting of personalities. This is not so frequent in a musical genre that often polarizes around individualities and that has eyes only for virtuoso soloists and the auras of stars. AWAKE is a certain incarnation of the idea of jazz in the way it progresses and is lived in the 21st century.

Without masking its fragilities, its romanticism, its secret melancholies, AWAKE draws from the convergence of its individual talents the force of its expressiveness. In this respect, these musicians remain faithful to jazz, envisioning the collective space as a setting for the outpouring of personal sensibilities, and without pretense. The secret of the group's strength is that it allows these self-expressions, which reveal in each of the instrumentalists when it is their turn to solo an explosiveness, a lyrical soaring, which rather than standing out seems to curl into the heart of the music and to sublimate it. Even when the compositions of Romain Cuoq and Anthony Jambon are sometimes influenced by folk songs or sound as quintet sonatas, this does not prevent blues or soul from emerging in their repertoire, whose themes with strong melodies, nourished by diverse inspirations, give the quintet a particular color, both sensitive and moving.

AWAKE takes the name of an awakening. The awakening of a group that emerged from the Parisian jazz club scene, that innovates and makes its difference heard. The awakening of a sound that closely approximates song and melody, that asserts its sensitivity and its lyricism. AWAKE heralds the birth of a new generation of French jazz musicians.