2005 release ** "The author's premises: `Bending The Tonic is a 12²-bar blues or what happens if you read Schönberg while listening to Bukka White`. We have already talked about Guy De Bièvre, a musician who commutes between Belgium and New York, reviewing the excellent “Manhattan [linear, circular, lateral]”, a portrait of the historic district of the `Big Apple` based on ambient recordings. On the surface, and when listening, this new creation, a composition performed by an instrumental group, appears completely different, but a more in-depth look cannot fail to identify a common root between the two works. In “Manhattan” the idea was to capture the concrete humus of the great North American metropolis and “Bending The Tonic” ultimately moves from the same need, even if that humus is now captured through the decomposition of one of the musics that for time immemorial have represented the soundtrack of that same city: the blues. Because this remains a blues album, broken down, reinterpreted and expanded as much as you want, but still blues. Bending The Tonic is a piece partly composed and partly improvised, according to a very precise structure, and is proposed in two versions recorded in concert, the first in Belgium and the second in New York. The two versions differ in length and in the instrumentalists present, in addition to the author, appearing in both efforts only Peter Zummo on trombone and Anne La Berge on flute (two names that, especially the first, deserve more attention)."