Joëlle Léandre Celebrates Her Rebellious Music with Old and New Friends

By Eyal Hareuveni

Joëlle Léandre - Lifetime Rebel (RogueArt, 2024)

The 2023 edition of the Vision Festival honored French double bass master Joëlle Léandre with Lifetime Achievement, celebrating the first fifty years of her incredible, international career. The box-set Lifetime Rebel presents four performances with outfits from the festival, two with working trios - Tiger Trio, with pianist Myra Melford and flutist Nicole Mitchell, and Roaring Tree, with pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri, and two new collaborations, and with poet Fred Moten, all recorded on the same night at Roulette in Brooklyn during the Vision Festival on July 13th, 2023, the opening night of the festival. The Atlantic Ave. Septet, with sax player Ingrid Laubrock, trombonist Steve Swell, guitarist Joe Morris, violinist Jason Kao Hwang, violist Mat Maneri, and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm playing Léandre’s composition, who also played on the same night in the Vision Festival, was recorded at Sons d’hiver Festival in Vincennes, France, in January 2024.

The box-set also features a DVD, Struggle, Life, Music where the head of RogueArt label, Michel Dorbon, interviews Léandre about her work and the seminal influence of Afro-American jazz, with its celebration of life and freedom, on her life and free improvised music. Léandre provides an insightful socio-historical context of free music and plays a few solo improvisations. “Improvisation means something. We are not free”, she says. “Free music means nothing to me. When you have an instrument in your hand, (you) are not free. When you improvise, it’s a selection. It’s a kind of continuous composition”, she says.

Tiger Trio opened the Vision Festival and its live set is the third one released by RogueArt (following and Unleashed and Map of Liberation, both were also recorded live, in 2016 and 2019). This trio plays a kind of chamber, free improvisation of six short pieces, often in stimulating and passionate duets or in confronting interplay. All pieces highlight Léandre as a one-of-her-kind, always inventive, imaginative and poetic force of nature, singing and shouting her wordless but very expressive stream of thoughts, as well as the profound yet totally unpredictable dynamics of this great, leaderless trio.

The second set (but the fourth album) was Léandre’s first performance with poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten (who released an excellent album with bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver, Reading Group, 2022). Moten, like Léandre, believes that art can change the world, and like Walter Benjamin, looks backward as we’re blown forward. Moten reads in commanding, passionate voice poems from his book Hughson’s Tavern relating to The Conspiracy of 1741, also known as the Slave Insurrection of 1741 or roasts Ken Burns’s PBS series Jazz that ignored Afro-American heroes like Cecil Taylor, while Léandre taps to his restless, raging drive, colors the poems with mournful vocals, and occasionally - and quite rarely - play walking bass, pizzicato.

The third set (but the second disc) was with Taborn and Maneri, who recorded before with Léandre on hEARoes, RogueArt, 2023. Maneri recorded before with Léandre in the Stone Quartet with pianist Marilyn Crispell and trumpeter Roy Campbell and in Judson Trio with drummer Gerald Cleaver). This set was the only second performance of the newly titled Roaring Tree trio but nothing was roaring. The atmosphere was quite reserved and introspective, allowing the music to flow naturally, in deep listening and a telepathic interplay between Léandre and Maneri, as these gifted improvisers sketch rich and complex instant compositions, and sound like contemporary, chamber music.

The fourth set (but the third disc) that closed this magnificent, emotional night was by the Atlantic Eve. Septet. The ensemble premiered Léandre’s composition after three days of rehearsal. Atlantic Ave, is where Roulette is located in Brooklyn and where the Vision Festival took place. The score was projected on a screen (and excerpts are replicated in the box’ booklet), and captured best Léandre’s rebellious and mischievous spirit. This composition relies on the poetic and often dramatic and fiery dynamics of the string musicians, led by Léandre, with Swell and Laubrock acting as agent provocateurs, and, naturally, it leaves enough room for individual, irreverent interpretations. Dorbon summarizes this jubilant performance as suggesting that there should be no hierarchy between all music, written or unwritten, vernacular or improvised, learned or popular, and only the music and musicians bring it to its triumphant life.

Joëlle Léandre and Lauren Newton - Great Star Theater, San Francisco (Other Minds Records, 2024) 

Great Star Theater, San Francisco is the fifth duo album of Léandre and American-born, Germany-based vocal artist Lauren Newton, capturing their live performance at Other Minds Festival 26 on October 2022. Léandre and Newton have been performing together for nearly 30 years, and have always been exploring unpredictable inseparable textures of deep tones, enigmatic vocals and lingos of their own, flowing with pure joy. The five improvised pieces suggest intense yet gentle, intimate moods and adventurous stories that only close and dear friends like Léandre and Newton, with their rich and imaginative idiosyncratic languages, can find new things to share and harmonize. The performance reaches its emotional climax with the last piece, “Kujira No Uta” (Whale Song). Fellow bassist, and The Free Jazz Collective’s David Menestres, who wrote the liner notes, calls Léandre and Newton “modern myth makers telling their stories across decades, always reflecting the sign of the times. The worlds they spontaneously create reflect the current moment back upon us, influencing not only our present but showing the ever-evolving possibilities for the future. Which is now. And now. And now”.