JazzFolk & World
One Drop · 24 April 2026
“Matongué” begins on a cello line that could come out of a baroque suite, and within a few bars it has become a ballroom three-four with the piano on top and Manuel Pramotton’s soprano saxophone commenting from the side. Six minutes and thirty-one seconds that sum up what this album is: a string quartet, an African pianist and a saxophone, all of them working as a rhythm section when required.
Ensemble Partage are Italian and take their name from the French word for sharing. Two violins, viola and cello, plus Pramotton on soprano and Marco Giovinazzo and Nesta Mondelice on percussion; it was recorded at Studio Peninsula in Sarzeau, Brittany. The usual working method is for the strings to lay down a short riff that keeps shifting and for the piano to enter above it with countermelodies.
“Hysteria” (2:45) and “Ngandajika” (4:41) are the two pieces built on minimalist repetition, and the second holds up best on repeated listening. “Mopti” pulls the piano out of the background and gives it the riff while the cello sustains long, mournful notes. “Twist & Smile” is seven minutes of ragtime seen from Kinshasa, and “Partage” closes with the only voice on the record, Lema’s, over an air that sounds Caribbean.
Lema was born on 30 March 1946 in Lufu-Toto, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and has lived in France for decades. The album came out twenty-five days after his eightieth birthday.
The price of the formula is that four string players spend much of the forty-six minutes accompanying. The melodic foreground always belongs to the soprano or the piano, and the strings almost never step out to say anything on their own; on a record that puts the quartet in half its title, it is a waste that shows up most on “Aquarius”, where the writing was clearly there for them.
One Drop, 24 April 2026. Nine tracks, 46 minutes.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Aina Torrents