An eclectic composer and a pianist of a rare elegance, Jean-Marie Machado has accustomed us , since the eighties, to opening the doors of modern jazz to other musical worlds. With his ensemble Danzas he took a new step in 2006 by creating several works taking their inspiration from sources as diverse as song, traditional music, dance, and classical music. In this latest production, Cantos Brujos (Witch Songs), all of these aesthetics are brought into play in an adaption of El Amor Brujo by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, known to French music lovers as L'amour Sorcier.

Dating from 1915, it was originally a narrated and sung ballet-pantomime for chamber orchestra, then later arranged for symphonic orchestra and ballet. A hundred years later, Jean-Marie Machado takes it up and decides to adapt it under the name of Cantos Brujos, while preserving the script of the libretto written by the playwright Gregorio Mart?nez Sierra. The result is a series of witch songs, each one being a chapter of this fantastic fairy tale.

Co-producer G?rard de Haro, the twelfth man of the orchestra, as Jean-Marie Machado says, reveals all the subtleties of a music where the blue notes of jazz mingles with the glowing hues of impressionist themes that sometimes evoke French music - Debussy, Ravel or Poulenc. We can also hear music of the third stream, the music genre born in the 1950s in which composers such as Gunther Schuller and John Lewis wanted to build bridges between jazz and classical European music. And one thinks, of course, of Gil Evans and his science in arranging, used, in particular, for the album Sketches of Spain (Miles Davis) in which Manuel de Falla was already present.