Sax player Michaël Attias is often described as one of the most questing
and keenly collaborative figures on the New York jazz scene, His first solo
album, échos la nuit (Echo by Night) finds him collaborating with himself,
playing simultaneously “left-hand alto (sax)/right-hand piano/right foot
sustain pedal”. This album was "twelve years in gestation and recorded in a
little over an hour ". No overdubs, just "melodies in free fall… The
reverberation is from the room and the sympathetic resonance of the piano
strings set into vibration by the sound of the saxophone."
The 12 short pieces were improvised, recorded at La Maison en Bois in
Abéville-La-Rivière, France, in December 2017. Still, all highlight his
highly personal concept of sensual lyricism, “a kind of musical
synesthesia, but where music is the only subject and the only object”, as
his friend and close collaborator Anthony Coleman calls it (Attias guested
on many of Coleman’s albums, beginning on Selfhaters, Tzadik’s Radical
Jewish Culture, 1996).
These instant, supposedly simple, compositions allude to Attias' nuanced and
imaginative language as well as his unique sense of space. The
mysterious “Trinité” plays with angular-serpentine Monk-ish lines and
brings to mind Steve Lacy interpretation of Thelonious Monk work. The
whispering, seductive alto sax on “Grass” adapts North African scales.
“Fenix III” borrows a chord from the late Japanese pianist Masabumi
Kikuchi, with whom he performed and later was inspired by him to compose
“Nerve & Limbo” (Nerve Dance, Clean Feed, 2017). “Circles” is a deep
meditation on extended breathing techniques where every touch of the sax
key and every blow is a decisive one. “Rue Oberkampf” goes back to Attias’
early twenties in Paris studying Schillinger Technique of Musical
Composition. “Song for the Middle Pedal” charms with its quiet innocence.
“Sea in the Dark” and the last “Echoes II: Night” offers dark, film-noir
narratives, still, surprises with their suggestive, poetic tone on both the
sax and the piano.
And back to Anthony Coleman that reminds us the wise words of Morton
Feldman: “Now that everything’s so simple, there’s so much to do.” You
should listen to the many, enchanting things that Michaël Attias does.
Even more...
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