For the past few years, the younger generation has shown decisively to be ready to take the lead. After the altoist Steve Houben, the vibraphonist Guy Cabay, and a few others, a young saxophonist (tenor and soprano) has stepped into the foreground and who-with his first albums straightway placed himself on the level of the most illustrious of his predecessors. Pierre VAIANA is all of thirty years old. Alter early interests in painting and having made his debut on the saxophone in small rock and jazz-rock groups, Pierre Vaiana decided, alfer 1976, to devote himself to jazz. He studied with the american saxophonist, Lou Mc Connell and attended the classes of Alan Silva in Paris and those of the jazz Seminaire and Jazz Class of the Conservatory of Liège (Karl Berger, Andrea Centazzo, Garrett List, and particularly Steve Lacy).

Then began performing in different groups like ” l’Orchestre” and the “Collectif du Lion”, the Richard Roussellet Quintet, and the Big Band Act among others. Listening to Vaiana, two names come to mind – Steve Lacy (“few musiciens have gone as far as he, musically and humanly”) and Sonny Rollins. From the former, he as inherited certain mannerisms in the emission of the note as weil as how to make the soprano whine a sound as much like the human voice as possible. From the latter, he has kept the sense of rocky lyricism and iconoclastic interpretation. Between Lacy and Rollins and between the tenor and the soprano, Vaiana has, with the passing of the years, created his own language and arrived at his “first maturity”. Since 1984 he has directed his own group, Trinacle, a trio without piano composed of the dutch bassist Hein Van de Geyn and the belgian drummer Felix Simtaine.

J-P Schroeder

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