The Cedar Presents
An Evening with SISSOKO, SEGAL, PARISIEN, PEIRANI: LES ÉGARÉS
Thursday, March 27, 2025/ Doors: 7:00 PM / Show: 7:30 PM
All Ages
Seated
$33 Advance, $38 Day of Show
This is a seated show with general admission, first-come-first-served seating. The Cedar is happy to reserve seats for patrons who require special seating accommodations. To request seating or other access accommodations, please go to our Access page.
For Cedar presented shows, online ticket sales typically end one hour before the door time, and then, based on availability, tickets will be available at the door.
LISTEN
Ballake Sissoko And Vincent Segal: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, video courtesy of SISSOKO, SEGAL, PARISIEN, PEIRANI
“Nan Sira Madi” by Ballaké Sissoko, video courtesy of Ballaké Sissoko
ABOUT THIS SHOW
The quartet, Sissoko, Segal, Parisien, Peirani présents "Les Égarés" (The Wandering), two virtuoso duos (Sissoko-Segal and Peirani-Parisien), who for years have excelled in the art of cross-fertilising sounds and transcending genres.
From jazz to Mandingo music and tango, this combination of kora, cello, accordion, and saxophone is sure to charm all those lucky enough to witness this unique quartet.
Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Vincent Segal (cello) on one side, Vincent Peirani (accordion) and Emile Parisien (saxophone) on the other.
‘You walk without knowing where you’re going, letting yourself drift, giving into the pleasure of being lost’ sums up Vincent Segal.
LES ÉGARÉS
Les Egarés is a play space, a locus of musical life, a poetic asylum inhabited by two duos: Ballaké Sissoko (kora) and Vincent Segal (cello) on the one hand and Vincent Peirani (accordion) and Émile Parisien (sax) on the other. In the case of these magicians, 2 + 2 no longer makes 4, it makes 1. Because what they concoct is most definitely a unity of spirit, a single and fluid sound that disdains all forms of egotistical competitiveness and puts each participant at the service of a common musical good. Neither jazz, nor trad, nor chamber, nor avant-garde, but a bit of all of them, all at once, Les Egarés is the kind of union that makes the ear the king of all instruments, where virtuosity expresses itself in the art of complicity, where the simple and grandiose idea of listening to one another results in the birth of a splendid song with four parts - without solo voice that never stops singing.
It all started with a summit meeting–high on a hill overlooking Lyon. That night in June 2019, at Les Nuits de Fourvière Festival, everyone was preparing to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the NØ FØRMAT label in a beautiful setting of Roman stones under an open sky. Vincent Segal played the role of master of ceremonies and held a kind of musical salon, gathering together guests of choice, among whom were Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Peirani and Émile Parisien. The participants signed a pact: rehearsing must never take precedence over anything that showed signs of being a moment of spontaneous creation. But how to reign in such inspired musicians, all of them enlivened by this desire to converse in music? That afternoon, in an arbour that shielded them from the hot sun, they started to jam, just for the beauty and pleasure of it, and the music just flowed like a spring, fresh and limpid. It was the memory of this spontaneous outpouring that gave rise to the idea of forming a quartet of Egarés (‘those who have goneastray’). And that’s what the recording of the album felt like too: a spontaneous sharing of impulse and know-how. Only one promise couldn’t be fulfilled, one long held dear by Vincent Segal, and that was to record in Bamako with his accomplice Ballaké Sissoko, as the pair had previously done for their divine debut Chamber Music. The extreme tension that currently holds sway in Mali scuppered this dream and, in the end, the four musicians set up their creative workshop in the alpine town of Gap. Outside, the weather was unpredictable; in the studio, the sun came out almost immediately. But it wasn’t a bland unchanging beauty: from the first notes, everything was volatile, in motion, vibrating. No surprises there: none of these four free-stylers likes to be imprisoned, whether it’s in a particular role, or in a particular style or sound to which their instrument could so easily be confined. Each bought a few rough diamonds along in their knapsack and submitted them to the group.
Tempered by that common fire, in the natural crucible of alive acoustic setting, those gems took on a new form, sublimating themselves and soon providing the material for an authentic and communal trove of music–musical gold in fact, melted down into a singular alloy of tones, touches, breaths and phrasings, that starts with a motif in unison that straightway spells out the basic alchemical formula.
Les Egarés reminds us of the rebelliousness that can be found in a spirit of concord and the extent to which the art of playing together with such fine intelligence can generate an extremely subtle way of lighting a fuse. Contrary to a received and tedious notion, living in harmony doesn’t necessarily mean fatally constraining oneself to irksome compromises, flabby consensus and other soporific routines. When they want to, peace and harmony can kick ass. And with these four, they want to do just that, they want to do it all the time. In Les Egarés, they even raise mountains, reordering the musical landscape to uncover lines of escape of a hitherto unheard beauty.
To learn more about Ballaké Sissoko:
To learn more about Vincent Segal:
To learn more about Vincent Peirani:
To learn more about Émile Parisien: