Sylvie Courvoisier- To Be Other-Wise (Intakt, 2024)

By Gregg Miller

A dexterous and imaginative exploration of and use of the piano's range of timbres: chamber-avant, solo piano, we get jagged slabs, fingers of concrete, pathos; speed repetition on prepared piano, tinny metal comb hits; urgent marimba-esque woody buzz; pure, lush piano; spare and ineffable; joyful. Courvoisier’s playing is assertive, direct. No blur, all in your face, even the delicacy. A complete master, Courvoisier can play with style, passion and anything she wants. At this point, it’s a matter of design and surprise.

Courvoisier’s previous record on Intakt, Chimaera (2023), with Wadada Leo Smith, Nate Wooley, Drew Gress, Kenny Wollesen, and Christian Fennesz, is magnificent. This solo piano recording (the second of her long career) is a gift of more and continued transcendence, though with a very different feel, or set of feels. Here each tune is a like a private miniature, each dedicated to a different person (and one to her cats). There are exquisite moments, tunes I will return to and add to my forever compilation playlist, delicate, daring, every note and pause vital to the overall effect. Others are more about rigor or patterns, academic even. You may prefer those. I may even prefer them in a few years. What I loved on this round of listening was the inventiveness of the prepared piano interspersed with the unaltered sounds. It deeply humanized the tone, turned the hammered strings into a personal voice, both lyrical and rhythmic.

Is the record title a reference to Levinas’s Otherwise than Being? To already be open to the other’s otherness—a normative standard much in need these days of renewed nativism. It is a fond sentiment undergirding free music, although that’s trickier to pull off on a solo recording.

The opening number is beautiful and mysterious, then broiling rage leveled to a simmering, low piano keys striking mute against determined plucking. Cinematic. The second track (“Hotel Esmeralda (for Hugo Pratt)”) offers an immediate contrast: unadorned piano, spacious, relaxed, a gentle offering, just a little bluesy, contemplative, like the morning after, running into heavy weather. The title track, “To Be Otherwise (for Amy Sillman),” feels studied, a modern composition, Parisian (or Swiss) in America. I don't love this tune, though I quite like certain moves it makes, and I can understand its appeal and its potentially upsetting nature if one were deeply embedded in the classical context. Is it the kind of thing Alex Ross might like? Best title and a highlight on the record goes to “Edging Candytuft” (dedicated to Mary Halvorson), a lovely phrase for patient, oral sex. Though Halvorson’s playing has yet to find a place in my heart, Courvousier’s prepared piano bang-splats and smushed key motifs is intriguing and compelling. “Frisking (for Henry Cowell) is wonderful for similar reasons.

If you are looking for more of Courvoisier’s interplay rather than solo material, beyond her recent, excellent Chimaera, check out, for example, “Obvious Obtuse” on As Soon as Possible (Cam Jazz, 2008), for her rapport with Ellery Eskelin, or on the same record, the interaction with Eskelin and bassist Vincent Courtois on “Mesure d’ailleurs.” Her support of their playing enables them to really spread out, to be gorgeous, fluid, inventive, and confident in the pauses and re-starts. Similarly, on the harder edged, pulsing “Taktlos 3” on her trio record Passagio (Intakt, 2002) with Susie Ibarra and Joëlle Léandre, all three are muscular, direct yet musical and mutually supportive. I admire their collaboration and its mysterious synergies, the delight that is evident in the surprise of what transpires. Courvoisier’s inside-the-piano work is so perfectly evocative against the energy of Ibarra and Léandre.