Henri Texier - An Indian's Life (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

By explicitly titling his new album “An Indian's Life”, double bassist and composer Henri Texier beautifully closes a sort of informal phonographic triptych — begun in 1993 with “An Indian's Week” and continued in 2016 with “Sky Dancers” — making the Native American cause and, beyond that, the quasi-mythological figure of the “Indian”, both the imaginary matrix and the poetic driving force of his artistic gesture. Because if in the end Henri Texier can claim in this new record to have managed once again to resonate with the Native American psyche, it is undoubtedly in this living relationship to memory, to ancestors, to tradition, that his music ( re)comes into play each time in such a sensitive way. Henri Texier will never be an Indian, he knows it, just as he will never be Charles Mingus - but both meet in his music and it is all his genius to make his most intimate voice heard through this imaginary dialogue.