EFG London Jazz Festival 2019

Moutin Factory Quintet 'Mythical River'

Event Has Passed

Last Show: Saturday 23 rd November 2019

PizzaExpress Jazz Club (Soho)

Returning from a tour along the Mississippi, twins Louis Moutin (drums) and Francois Moutin (bass) created the Moutin Factory Quintet’s third album 'Mythical River', a modern and positive statement about what pushed and keeps inciting humans to sing the blues.

Read more ...

In the mid-1980s, twins Louis Moutin (drums) and Francois Moutin (bass) went straight from scientific studies into becoming the rhythm section for French jazz stars like Martial Solal, Michel Portal and Michel Legrand. In the mid-1990s, while Louis kept working with more of the very best French jazz artists (Antoine Herve, Henri Texier…), Francois moved to New York and started collaborating with the top-level of the US scene (Mike Stern, Randy Brecker…).

In 2000, they joined forces to co-lead the Moutin Reunion Quartet, publishing 6 albums, relentlessly performing in Europe (France, Germany and the UK), but also just as much in the US, where the group went onto no less than 22 tours.

In 2013, the twins created a new group, the Moutin Factory Quintet and kept on reinforcing this transatlantic bridge with their growing musical print. In the early fall of 2018, this group created its third album “Mythical River” when returning from a two-weeks adventure along the Mississippi River, the first of the Moutins’ numerous American tours focusing almost exclusively on this one so very particular region.

Chicago, Saint Louis, Memphis, Bâton Rouge, New Orleans are mythic for jazz musicians as they form the geographic crucible from which emerged blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, rock, all musical genres that have since become universal, have greatly inspired the Moutin brothers and lit their inextinguishable inner fires.

All these musical genres have sprung from joys, sufferings, hopes and wanderings tied to the invention of the “new world” and it’s no coincidence if the Mississippi River - a key from historic, social and economic viewpoints – has produced its “primal scream”.

This energy, the vital forces expressed through it, the stories and emotions told in it, weave the backdrop of “Mythical River”. In complicity with their so talented partners - Christophe Monniot, Manu Codjia et Paul Lay - François et Louis Moutin talk intensely about human bond, fraternity, sharing and respect.

At the dawn of the digital world ahead, with its promises of freedom and its dangers of alienation, the “new” interrogations are fundamentally of a similar nature as these which have pushed us to sing the blues. It makes thus much sense for these artists to try conveying a message that we, humans, can keep moving forward while respecting who we are and our environment.

Band Lineup

Louis Moutin (drums/composition/co-leader)

François Moutin (acoustic bass/composition/co-leader)

Christophe Monniot (alto and sopranino sax)

Manu Codjia (electric guitar)

Pierre de Bethmann (piano)