• Joachim Govin, double bass
• Ben van Gelder, saxophone 
• Tony Tixier, piano
• Gautier Garrigue, drums

When the double bass holds the pen.

With Joachim Govin at the helm, this quartet makes the air shimmer as if each piece were a chapter written in real time. Govin has released two benchmark records with this very line-up —Elements (2015) and Present(2020)— featuring Ben van Gelder, Tony Tixier and Gautier Garrigue. On stage the sound is organic yet exact: melodies cut with elegance and rhythm that breathes, invites and ignites.

Van Gelder brings lyrical, probing lines —an award-winning altoist who has graced major European jazz stages— while Tixier shapes harmonic space with the poetic touch that marks him out in France’s new wave. Garrigue, a drummer of immaculate finesse (a mainstay with projects such as the Gil Evans Paris Workshop), anchors and agitates in equal measure with an irresistible pulse.

Govin’s quartet moves along the seam between writing and surprise: themes that open, swerve and shed their skin without losing the narrative thread. Music with its own print that, free of artifice, draws you closer and deeper.  

At Casa des Poble d’Esporles, expect that kind of “quiet revelation” that ensures the next concert can never be quite the same as tonight.