At the crossroads… What do a fakir, a little dancer and Captain Nemo have in common? These three characters neglect the beaten trails and, in their search for grace, move into unexplored territories to find their own means of expression. It is not surprising to encounter them during the course of Denis Levaillant's creations – the models resemble their painter. Refusing both the formalism of speculative music and the populism that is deemed good taste, his work continually brandishes his independence and freedom. And the public finds its way, discovering music composed neither 'despite' nor 'against' it but not seeking to 'butter it up' either. Remaining aloof from the quarrels of coteries, Denis Levaillant's music develops its own language, never forgetting to devote equal shares to the intellect (precise writing) and to the sensual (concern for the resulting sound). In that, Denis Levaillant is truly a 'French' composer. His Frenchness is equally evident in the attention paid to timbre, this quality of texture, these pastels that punctuate his catalogue. This search for colours is also present in the harmony – an approach that links him to his predecessors, from Rameau to Ravel. And like Ravel – but also like Debussy, Varèse, Milhaud, Poulenc, Jolivet –, Levaillant ogles the other side of the Atlantic: the United States, cradle of jazz. A virtuoso pianist and improviser before becoming a composer, from his years of training, he has retained this freedom and energy that are often lacking in more academic composers. 'To think freely,' he points out, 'the musician improvises, just as the philosopher strolls'. Denis Levaillant has erected this freedom as a line of conduct/source of action, an ethic, and which has found in the saxophone – the king of jazz –, an emissary made to measure. One suspects that, in the creative process, Denis Levaillant is not one to settle for writing: his music not being for paper but for ears, it is through an unavoidable phase of working with the performer that the work takes shape, conceived above all as sound matter to be formed. If we are to judge from the result, we are forced to believe that there was perfect harmony with saxophonist Jean-Michel Goury. These 'laboratory experiments' with the performer translate in particular by the combination, a priori difficult but so successful here, of the magic of spontaneity and the rigour of work, the initiatory gesture and sense of development, of an overall vision and concern for detail. In other words, Levaillant makes us forget the labour involved. There again, this approach is akin to that of jazzmen. From jazz, he accepts not only the approach but also the mode of expression. Establishing rhythm as a language (thereby giving back to it its original sense of quality of discourse, consisting of alternating accented and unaccented syllables. Listen to Manhattan Rhapsody): he does not, for all that, neglect the other parameters (pitch, timbre, dynamics), of which the inextricable relations with rhythm are at the basis of swing. Torn between the asceticism of a Monk (in the gaps in time/tempo, as well as the dissonant melodism of certain Figures) and the over-abundance of a Coltrane (in the generosity and virtuosity of Tant de joie! or the even movements of Le Fakir), his music never departs from this oratorical idea, that is also to be found in the lyricism of Music is the film or Attractions. He pushes this lyricism to the point of hybridization in Tant d’amour !, where the instrument becomes voice, and the voice instrument, when the flautist must simultaneously sing in unison with what (s)he is playing. Amongst the other strange creatures that punctuate this disc, we will find the polyphonic saxophone with the extended range played 'like a single man' by the Xasax Quartet in Attractions, or else the transformation of Jean-Michel Goury, thanks to the miracles of overdubbing, into an ensemble of 12 saxophonists, exploring the mysterious, subterranean universe of the harmonic spectrum in Les Accords secrets du Capitaine Nemo. One understands why the collaboration on the opera O.P.A. Mia, with the illustrator Enki Bilal, this other fan of hybrids, was such a success… There is also the fact that Levaillant's sound universe is resolutely visual (let us simply recall that the subject of the ballet La petite danseuse came to him from a sculpture by Degas). Quite often, he refers to the universe of the Seventh Art, going so far as to compose the sound track of a film that exists only in the images to which it gives rise (Music is the film). Between sounds and colours, but also between Paris and New York, composition and interpretation, writing and improvisation, construction and playing, popular and 'highbrow', tonalism and atonalism, fusion and splitting, lyricism and virtuosity, mystery and transparency…, Levaillant invents a new art, at the crossroads. Benjamin Lassauzet