Music Reviews from the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House

 

July 11, 2026
Bijou - Florian Stoffner
Label: Relative Pitch Records
Catalog #: RPRSS056
Location: New York, United States
Release Date: July 24, 2026
Media: compact disc or digital download
bandcamp.com entry
discogs.com entry

 

We approach the review of Bijou by Florian Stoffner cautiously and respectfully. The album is our introduction to the guitar playing of Stoffner. (Yes, we are aware that every time we admit that an album is our first listen to a "new" musician, we reveal our ignorance of the considerable history of that musician. Such is the case with Stoffner, who has contributed to dozens of albums with distinguished collaborators in the twenty-first century.) Bijou appears as the latest installment in the Relative Pitch Records Solo Series, one of our most reliable venues for discovering new music, living as we do far from an urban center where we might routinely encounter such music in a live setting. The elephant in the room, at least to our ears, is the immediate reference to Derek Bailey that emerges through-out our listening to the six electric guitar solos on the album.

So we have to tackle this conundrum. A hallmark of non-idiomatic improvisation is creative originality. To so unabashedly conjure up references to another musician is to risk being labeled as derivative. We could not help but feel like we were asked to find where along this spectrum the music of Bijou fell. Lots of questions come to mind. Once a sequence of notes has been played, can another play them again with authenticity? It seems too restrictive to unequivocally disallow subsequent interpretations of a piece. Although it seems unbelievable to write it, Derek Bailey was born nearly one hundred years ago (January 29, 1930) and died more than twenty years ago (December 25, 2005). Has a sufficient period of mourning been observed to allow the next generation to reinvestigate the winding musical back alleys that he first mapped?

Ultimately our impulse to question the originality of the music was defeated by its beauty. The ears told the brain to quiet down so they could hear the notes. The brain decided that it was not a worthwhile pursuit to spend time trying to justify reasons to invalidate the art of Florian Stoffner. Thus despite our initial misgiving, we found ourselves repeatedly listening to this album and enjoying it very much.

photo credit: Cristina Marx/Photomusix

Let's talk briefly about courage. We love thinking about courage because we have always thought of ourselves as lacking it in sufficient amount. No small part of the allure of creative musicians is appreciating their courage to pursue creativity in unconventional directions, where there is a high probability that they will not encounter broad acclaim or vast riches. The six tracks on the album are all titled "bijou". Each title is appended with a letter, the first "bijou t", the second "bijou a" and so on. The six additional letters spell the German word tapfer, which when translated to English means brave. This clue makes me believe that (of course) Florian Stoffner knew exactly what he was doing and invited the conundrum that played out in my mind. Kudos to him. Kudos also to Relative Pitch Records for releasing the album.

We end this review with a personal anecdote illustrating the life-changing power of non-idiomatic improvisation. On March 25, 1999, I drove one hundred miles down I-75 to Chattanooga on a date with a girl who had come to town to visit me. I'd seen the advertisement that Derek Bailey was playing. I had been a long time admirer of his music but I had never thought that, living as I did in Tennessee, I would ever have the chance to hear him play live. He was booked at a closed down motel called Lamar's. It was not well identified and hard for strangers to the city to find. We finally found the building a few minutes late. We uncertainly entered the lobby because from the outside it looked exactly like a closed-down motel. We found an eclectic group of Chattanoogans milling about in the lobby. We passed them by and walked down the motel hallway. On either side, the doors to the rooms were open. Glancing inside as we walked by, we saw folks hanging out, sitting in chairs and on the edge of beds, drinking beer and eating take-out. As we proceeded down the hall, a distinctive plinking and plonking reached our ears. Bailey had already started playing. The hallway ended in a little meeting room modestly packed with a sort of blue collar intelligentsia of Chattanooga. He played in a trio with local stalwarts Bob Stagner and the late Dennis Palmer of Shaking Ray Levis. Ironically, the walls of the room were decorated with cheesy glossy prints 1980's prints of saxophones and the like. (note: Is this detail an embellishment added by memory? Unsure.) Everyone in the audience seemed to know each other. I remember particularly one individual arriving wearing a wooly fez and a colorful bed sheet draped around his shoulders like crown and cape. He was greeted by many as if he were royalty. I left that concert with a very high opinion of Chattanooga indeed. It was an auspicious day for me because my date, though no dedicated fan of non-idiomatic improvisation, enjoyed the evening nearly as much as I did and appreciated many of the same things I had. A couple years later we were married and last month we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Listening to Bijou brought this memory to the fore. (Incidentally, both parties must have been fond of this show because they later released it on Incus in the UK and Shaking Ray Records in the US.)

personnel:

  • Florian Stoffner (guitar)
    • social media
    • youtube - John Butcher, Florian Stoffner & Chris Corsano at Festival Musica Privata XIII (Łódź, Poland, 2025)
    • youtube - Paul Lovens & Florian Stoffner from Dia Internacional do Jazz (Coimbra, Portugal, 2019)

 

Related Reviews from the Poison Pie Publishing House


More music reviews from the Poison Pie Publishing House