Jean-Luc Ponty, one of the most international French jazzmen on the current scene, moved to the United States thirty-four years ago. And since then the violin virtuoso has plied his bow alongside some of the most legendary figures in the music world including Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin. Ponty’s performances back home in France have been few and far between, however, the musician wryly remarking that “No man is a prophet in his own country!” RFI Musique hooked up with Ponty in a bar near the Metro station Courcelles, in Paris, on one of his rare visits, and asked the man famous for pioneering jazz rock and electric experimentation on the violin about his impressionistic new album.

Having signed a contract with Koch Records for a new album, Ponty set about working on material which, he claims, “has nothing revolutionary about it”, approaching things in a more organic, acoustic way, but throwing in sporadic bursts of electro here and there. “Before I got down to work, I went through my drawers and got out all these old remnants, little snatches of themes,” Ponty explains, “The way I compose and imagine things is a bit like a writer. Ideas begin to take root without me having any particular project, any plan of where I’ll take them. I note things down and record as I go along and when the album suddenly bursts through it’s all there. I don’t have to start from scratch. When you’re involved in creating an original work, you can’t just order the flame of inspiration to appear. You’ve got to slip into a state of semi-unconsciousness.”

However, before actually getting down to composing material for The Acatama Experience Ponty spent most of 2006 on the road with his group, playing an extensive series of international concerts. “I came back from that tour with my ears completely fresh,” he says, “And the impressions that trip made upon me helped the album mature, playing a vital part in its development.” The Acatama Experience can be listened to as a straightforward geographical journey, with stop-offs in Chile, Bombay and rural Ireland, as Ponty renders details of the landscapes he visited in glorious musical colours. Appropriately enough, the trip starts off in the French capital with a reworking of the Bud Powell classic, Parisian Thoroughfare, funkily rearranged by the pianist Willliam Lecomte. This track, the only cover on the album, includes the howl of fire engines and snatches of urban conversations as Parisians dash along the boulevards.

After capturing the ambience of the city, Ponty heads off to the wide open expanses of the dunes and desert landscapes tend to dominate from this point. The violinist, it appears, was totally bowled over by a post-concert visit to the Atacama desert in northern Chile. Atacama, renowned as the most arid stretch of land on the planet, is known as “the kingdom of silence” and NASA regularly carries out experiments there - appropriate, given the striking lunar landscape where the only sign of life are fleeting glimpses of a few rare birds. “For a musician like me used to being surrounded by sound, silence like that is actually disturbing,” says Ponty, “It’s a completely brilliant experience! I started listening to these electro loops on my Ipod that I’d put to one side in the ‘80s and I used them as a foundation as I tried to recapture that special atmosphere of the desert, painting it in music.” Desert Crossing is a highly symbolic track, a personal rite of passage for its protagonist, featuring the first violin solo recorded “completely bare” without machines or special effects - a heroic act for this explorer!

Geographically speaking, Celtic Steps moves things on to Ireland, but the track is also a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement to Dizzy Gillespie who once told the young Ponty, freshly arrived in the U.S., “You play good, boy, but you’d be better off playing country!” At this stage in his career, the young Ponty had not yet explored his jazz filiation on the violin. Later on the album On My Way To Bombay is a fond reminiscence of the Indian music played with McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, marking a stark contrast as listeners move from the empty desert landscape to the teeming streets of Bombay.

Ponty’s album, full of reliefs, contours and hidden depths, is a temporal voyage as well as a geographical one. Premonition hurls us into the future but other tracks such as Back In The 60’s, Without Regrets and Last Memories Of Her display a fond nostalgia for the past. “I think that’s perfectly normal at my age,” says Ponty, “I live in the present, but the present is woven of memories, musical branches and roots.” And on tracks like Still in Love and Euphoria the musician occasionally halts his outer voyage to explore his inner state of mind. But don’t get him wrong, as Point Of No Return spells out, Ponty has “no desire to musically reproduce something that’s already been done before. I’ve no nostalgia for that!” The final track on the album, To and Fro, also explores temporal issues, ending on a poignant note of hesitation. “It’s a limited form of movement between two fixed points, a moment of time suspended, not moving forward at all,” he says.

The Acatama Experience, combining as it does elements of classic jazz, jazz rock, bursts of electro and solo virtuosity, stands as a testament to the different musical phases Ponty has explored in his career. “It’s like an unconscious musical patchwork of the musician I’ve become!” he declares. An album, one might add, which contains the musings of a man questioning his relationship to space, time and the universe, meditating on the cosmos via his violin. One small step for man, as they say, but one giant leap for mankind!