Michel Columbier’s ‘Emmanuel’

A singular violin holding a holy G ascending through her own reverb.   A plucked harp string sets the sonorous ripples of orchestration into motion.  The movement is light and airy, distant and longing.

It is a string arrangement with a warmth that makes one draw breath.

Michel Colombier’s arrangement just weeps with a life of experience.  Chris Botti’s lone muted trumpet over the bass and sparing strings says the same line of  phrasing with slight variation, but renewed longing and expression.  Lucia Micarelli’s poetic responses are the perfect compliment.

Visually, this combination produces the cold, slow-moving underwater dance sequence of silhouettes, like in the opening credits to a Bond movie…or the lone travels of Bruce Banner at the closing credits to “the Incredible Hulk” TV show…haunting, beautiful, stunning and solitary.

Michel Columbier‘s genius is rightly paid tribute by the mastery of Chris Botti and Lucia Micarelli, translated to another spiritually sensual rendition of Emmanuel.

If there can be scaffolding to the emotional effect of a song, Joe Harnell’s “The Lonely Man,” the theme song to ”The Incredible Hulk,” which ran from 1977 to 1982, sounds architecturally influenced by Columbier’s Emmanuel, written in 1971, resulting in a stark, pared down but similar design in its open, spacious construction.

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