Patrick Rondat @ La Maroquinerie, Paris

Thirty years ago, Patrick Rondat was hailed as France’s answer to Joe Satriani, and for a time, that trajectory felt entirely plausible. His face regularly appeared on the covers of guitar magazines, his third album Amphibia sold in respectable numbers for an instrumental release, and Jean-Michel Jarre enlisted him as lead guitarist for his touring band, placing him in front of arena-sized audiences across France and beyond.

Then the ground shifted. His strain of instrumental rock fell out of favor, and Rondat’s career followed suit. The past few years brought their share of setbacks, personal loss, the long interruption of the pandemic, and he stepped away from recording for nearly fifteen years, until 2025’s Escape from Shadows. Yet if his sold-out show at La Maroquinerie proved anything, it is that his audience never truly disappeared. If anything, judging by some young faces in the crowd, it has renewed itself.

For this two-hour survey of his catalogue, Rondat is backed by Manu Martin on keyboards, Dick Bruinenberg on drums, and longtime collaborator Patrice Guers on bass. As on the record, Gaëlle Buswel appears for a vocal turn on “Now We’re Home.” The technical level is, as expected, exacting across the board, but what registers most strongly is something less measurable. Rondat plays with a visible sense of gratitude. Not affected, not performative, a genuine humility. And the chemistry within the band is evident in the way they settle into extended passages, attentive to space as much as velocity. His signature touch, fluid, articulate, and consistently melodic, lyrical almost, remains the focal point without ever tipping into excess.

Now that Patrick Rondat has found his mojo let's hope it won't take another 15 years to hear from him again.

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