New trio albums with French master of the double bass Joëlle Léandre, one with a new trio and another with a working one.
Robert Dick / Joëlle Léandre/ Miya Masaoka - Solar Wind (Not Two, 2019) ****½
Three master improvisers in their first ever recording session - New
York-based flutist Robert Dick and koto player Miya Masaoka, who also plays
assorted percussion instruments, and French Léandre, who also
vocalizes-sings, recorded on September 2018 in New York. The 12 collective,
acoustic free-improvisation stress the urgent passion of Dick, Léandre and
Masaoka to search for new timbres and voices, resisting to follow familiar
strategies and dynamics, until it is almost impossible to identify
instruments and their players. Still, this ad-hoc trio succeeds to sound
like a seasoned, working trio that has found its very own aesthetics.
Some of the concise pieces sound as if the draw inspiration from
extraterrestrial winds and ancient journeys as the first “Whispering of the
Stars”, where the trio acts like they are communicating with friendly aliens. But this
atmosphere soon changes on “Speed of Silence” when Dick explodes-vocalizes
through his flutes - glissando, bass and contrabass, while Léandre and
Masaoka intensify the stormy-chaotic vein. Léandre’s low-end bowing on
“Chronotype” and “How Old Is Your Shadow?” trigger like-minded sounds from
Dick and Masaoka’s bowed koto, solidifying the cryptic spirit of this
piece. You can marvel at the delicate, magical interplay of this trio on
the exotic, last piece “Adiabatic”.
Australian, New York-based pianist Marc Hannaford who contributed liner
notes to Solar Wind writes about the paradox of “attributing agency and
intention in spite of my inability to tell which musician is making which
sound. Furthermore, this paradox of disembodied-yet tangential interaction
emerges from lucidity rich musical textures in which textures sound
overlap, interfere, evade and encircle each other, rather than extreme
textural density. This recording reveals the lush, playful beauty of this
paradox”. And indeed, with each listening you may decipher another
enigmatic element from the imaginative, microtonal sonic universes that
Dick, Léandre and Masaoka construct and deconstruct instantly and
constantly, alone and together.
To purchase the album: https://sellfy.com/p/zjkdbx/
Tiger Trio - Map of Liberation (Rogue Art, 2019) ****
Another trio of master improvisers that features Léandre with pianist Myra Melford and flutist Nicole
Mitchell. The Tiger Trio,
titled after a saying of Orson Wells who boasted that he had “the great
honor of swimming in the company of a tiger”, gravitates towards dense,
free jazz textures than the abstract, extraterrestrial flights of the trio
of Dick, Léandre and Masaoka trio. Map of Liberation is the sophomore album
of this trio, following Unleashed (Rogue Art, 2016), recorded live over two
days at a gallery in 19 rue Paul Fort, Paris, and at Festival Jazzdor,
Strasbourg, both in France on November 2018.
The 11 free-improvised, acoustic pieces are titled as Buddhist virtues but
by no means call for passive, quiet meditation, more like a deep dive with
a hyperactive tiger. These pieces stand for a total commitment for the art
of free-improv, for passionate, poetic fury and the urge to be one with
one’s instrument and fully aware of the moment. But this trio also
expresses a profound - spiritual and emotional - need to to search for new
ways to confront one’s instrument and find in it new sounds and meaning,
alone and together.
You can feel how this trio suggests the right kind of “Courage”- as one of
the pieces is titled, for Mitchell, Léandre and Melford to abandon familiar
modes; to enjoy, playful “Compassion, as another piece is titled; or
experiment with troubling “Reflection” of the self and contemplate, in a
quite loud manner, the concept of “Emptiness”, or in reserved, thoughtful
manner the meaning of “Steadfastness”. All as a tight trio that has
explored its very own “forest of sounds liberated by the instrumentalists”
- to quote French journalist Fançois-René Simon who wrote the liner notes -
and has found its balanced communion. Now you can understand why the last
three pieces answer to the titles “Respect”, “Humility” and “Honesty”.
0 comments:
Post a Comment