Jacques Kuba Séguin - La Trilogie des odeurs (ENG review)

Jazz

Some artistic visions demand patience. When trumpet player and composer Jacques Kuba Séguin conceived La Trilogie des odeurs, he set out to explore the profound connection between smell and sound, two senses that share a rare power to reach into the subconscious and awaken memories long thought dormant. Three albums and three years later, that vision stands complete, and it is nothing short of magnificent.

The perfumer’s art has long relied on the concept of the olfactory pyramid: top notes that dazzle immediately, heart notes that define the composition, and base notes that anchor everything, clinging to skin and memory long after the initial impression has faded. Séguin has mapped this structure onto a musical journey through the arc of a human life, and the result is one of the most cohesive and emotionally ambitious trilogies in recent Canadian jazz.

**La Trilogie des odeurs doesn’t just linger. It becomes part of you**

Parfum n°1 (released in 2023) sets the scene with an intimacy that is almost sacred. Inspired by the natural and raw materials that make up perfume, it explores the genesis of life, with delicate references to childhood and that first meeting between parent and child. The approach is deeply instinctive, often modal jazz where Séguin and pianist Jean-Michel Pilc are in constant dialogue, with Rémi-Jean LeBlanc and Kevin Warren carefully tending the thread of a conversation that yields rich exchanges. The centrepiece, Je suis là, with the warm, maternal voice of Elizabeth Shepherd joining the quartet, evokes the memory of a first meeting between mother and newborn with a tenderness that is simply magical. These are our top comments: vivid, fleeting, impossibly beautiful.

Parfum n°2 (released in 2024) opens up the canvas dramatically. Where the first volume concentrated on early childhood, this second chapter charts a stretch of young adult life — more energetic, more wilful, open to the future and its infinite possibilities. Written for the 17-piece Orchestre National de Jazz de Montréal under the direction of Philippe Côté, the five compositions weave together to form a narrative: the audacity and fiery arrogance of youth, the travels and encounters that shape it, the quest to build a life, and the humility of having to start again with the weight of past mistakes. The result is expansive and luminous, the heart notes of the trilogy, full-blooded and intoxicating.

Then comes Parfum n°3 (released in 2026), and with it, the base notes. True to the perfumer’s metaphor, this is the layer that clings, that endures, that reveals itself slowly and completely. Séguin entrusted this final chapter to the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières under conductor Alain Trudel, pairing the full symphony orchestra with a jazz quartet now featuring Rich Hirwin on drums and Morgan Moore on double bass alongside the ever-present Pilc. The decision is inspired: only a great number of voices, it seems, can hold the weight of a life’s worth of accumulated memory.

This third album opens with How We Start Again, a title that immediately signals both closure and continuity, the wisdom of age understanding that every ending is also a beginning. The warmth here is not the bright warmth of Parfum n°2, but something deeper and more seasonal, like afternoon light in late autumn. Some pieces consciously echo the first two chapters, allowing the symphony orchestra to expand and complete ideas that had been rootted earlier in the trilogy, a gesture of profound compositional intelligence. Close behind it, the seven minutes’ track Il n’y a pas de hasard burns with a quiet conviction: there are no coincidences, the title insists, only the slow accumulation of meaning that a life makes visible only in retrospect.

The standout is Fugue avec Anaïs (A Métis), a six-minute-and-forty-three-second marvel in which the interplay between jazz quartet and orchestra reaches its most searching and intimate. It carries the emotional weight of a specific, private memory, the kind only a name in a title can suggest, while remaining wholly universal.

The album closes with Le cortège des fragrances, a procession of scents, a parade of everything that has come before. It is a farewell that doesn’t feel like one, because the music, like the finest perfume, simply refuses to leave.

Each disc feels also like separate paintings. La Trilogie des odeurs is, to borrow a word from painting, a triptych. Each panel is self-contained, fully formed, and speaks its own distinct visual language. Yet placed together, the three panels illuminate each other in ways that none could achieve alone.

Taken as a complete 3-CD set, La Trilogie des odeurs reveals itself as far more than an ambitious musical project. It is a meditation on the human condition, combining olfactory memory with the soundtrack of our lives to create a rich and evocative musical universe, executed across three distinct sonic worlds, each perfectly calibrated to its theme, each more emotionally powerful than the last. Séguin, already celebrated for his Juno Award-winning Migrations, has with this trilogy secured his place among the most visionary modern composers.

The 3-CD set La Trilogie des odeurs is a work that feels carefully crafted yet never self-important, an album that offers genuine pleasure to the listener, and one imagines, reflects the same sense of fulfilment experienced by the musicians who brought it to life. A Must!

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, May 9th, 2026

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Parfum n°1

Musicians :
Jacques Kuba Séguin, trumpet and composition
Jean-Michel Pilc, piano
Rémi-Jean LeBlanc, doublebass
Kevin Warren, drums
Elizabeth Shepherd, voice

Vidar Lunden, sound engineer, mix and mastering
Émilie Beaudoin, album cover illustration
Album recorded at Studios Piccolo on Sept. 17th and 18th, 2022

Parfum n°2

Musicians :
Jacques Kuba Séguin, trumpet and composition
Jean-Michel Pilc, piano
Rémi-Jean Leblanc, double bass
Kevin Warren, drummer

Montreal National Jazz Orchestra
General Manager: Jacques Laurin
Conductor: Philippe Côté

Saxophones: Jean-Pierre Zanella, Samuel Blais, André Leroux, Frank Lozano, Alexandre Côté
Trombones: David Grott, Karine Gordon, Taylor Donaldson, Jean-Sébastien Vachon
Trumpets: Jocelyn Couture, Dave Mossing, David Carbonneau, Bill Mahar
Woodwinds: Jean-Pierre Zanella, Samuel Blais, Frank Lozano, Alexandre Côté

Guy Hébert, recording, mixing, and mastering
Florencia Torres, cover illustration
Recorded at Studios Piccolo on May 30th and 31st, 2023