In response to a world struggling with disruption and discord, Tony Tixier has instinctively turned towards his music as a way to re-establish the sundered connections of everyday existence. I Am Human, his latest limited edition release, was created when he returned from a sell-out US tour to find himself locked down in his Paris apartment. An escape route appeared out of a happy combination of chances: a loan of a new piano from Yamaha and an encounter with a neighbour, David Freiss, who turned out to be an expert sound engineer. Tixier conceived a plan to spontaneously record a series of pieces, all in one take, and then send them out across the world to a chosen band of his closest musical accomplices - Scott Tixier, Hermon Mehari, Ben Leifer, Logan Richardson and Adrien Soleiman - musicians with whom he felt so closely in tune that the enforced separation of time and space could be overcome - and invited them to overdub a response to create a series of virtual duet recordings “Each track is dedicated to a friend, someone I feel close to - I sent them the track in the morning, and by the afternoon I had the track back with their parts.”
‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ features Scott Tixier, Tony’s brother and also his twin, playing violin on the tune made famous by Billie Holiday - the level of empathy is otherworldly. “As humans, we all need a special person to watch over us: for me, this is my twin brother, my best friend.” Each track is dedicated to a friend and selected to talk about a different aspect of human emotion: ‘But Beautiful’ was sent to trumpeter Hermon Mehari as the message in the song sat naturally with his optimistic personality, ‘Like Someone In Love’ went all the way to Kansas City and love-struck bassist Ben Leifer and ‘You Know I Care’ elicited a rare, deeply committed performance on tenor sax from Adrien Soleiman. Tony contacted his longtime bandmate Logan Richardson, recalling an original tune over a well-loved sequence that they used to play: ‘When They Happen’ is the spontaneous result, developing into a thrillingly free flowing outro – “Logan is always so creative - like a visionary! We’re all a bunch of crazy guys and we just played what we felt at that moment.”.
