In 2011, at Stéphane Payen’s initiative, The Workshop adventure begins: a laboratory quartet formed by young talented musicians eager to discover new things. Hours of work, without precise objectives (a luxury!?), to discover, internalise and share the music of the saxophonist but also that of Doug Hammond (with whom Stéphane Payen has performed for many years) or, more surprisingly, that of the German composer Hans Werner Henze. Since 2015 and the release of two CDs on the Onze Heures Onze label, the collective has continued its monthly concerts in Paris and has toured the stages of France and Europe to meet all audiences.
Through this project, Stéphane Payen proposes a real reflection on certain foundations of sub-Saharan African music (mainly from West and Central Africa). Over the years, the saxophonist has carried out extensive research to understand what seems to govern music where the notion of the collective is paramount (as, for example, in Senegalese sabar or the music of the Aka and Ba-benzele pygmies).
It is not a question of studying a musical vocabulary (or copying an aesthetic) but rather of integrating its grammar and understanding how, over the centuries, groups of populations have been able to develop popular repertoires that are still alive and becoming richer every day (recent musicological research has already demonstrated the richness and “complexity” of these so-called traditional musics – see the work of Simha Arom, Dave Locke, Barak Schmool, Ivan Ormond, Patricia Tang).
In the note of intent of a previous project directed by Stéphane Payen (Sabar Ring, with the group Thôt, Ivan Ormond and 7 Senegalese percussionists and dancers), we read: “In this world of zapping, finding a sense of change and transformation becomes salvific. A change that would no longer be the sudden absorption of images and sounds constantly replaced by the following ones, but simply metamorphoses born of what happens between the musicians…”.
In Paris, far from the African continent, this is what the musicians of The Workshop (now a polymorphous ensemble) have been developing for twelve years now, in their own way, from the vocabularies and grammars proposed by Stéphane Payen.
