Duration can be a double-edged sword. When it’s handled wrong, longer-form music can just feel long. And in an age when a preponderance of music is served up in three or four minute-long bites, a tune doesn’t need to be too long to feel like a bit of a chew. But duration can justify itself by allowing a listener to untether the listening experience from recognizing structural elements and marking their repetitions. That’s certainly the case with the music on Chimaera, the debut album by a combo led by Sylvie Courvoisier that bears the same name.
Chimaera is an outgrowth of Courvoisier’s trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wolleson. To their number she added Nate Wooley, who brings a deep bag of extended trumpet techniques and an even deeper interrogative spirit, and Christian Fennesz, whose application of electronics can transform the sound of his guitar beyond recognition. And for this session, she added another trumpeter, Wadada Leo Smith.
One might expect a band named after a fire-breathing, two-headed beast to singe some ear hairs, but that’s not really the case. It’s more likely that the Swiss-born pianist and composer, who has been based in Brooklyn since the late 1990s, chose it for its mythological dimension. The album’s compositions were inspired by the paintings of Odilon Redon, a direct predecessor of surrealism. Their length permits the listener to be simply be present as the music manifests in diaphanous layers of color and forms that are perceptible, but not always recognizable. Gress begins “Le Pavot Rouge,” the album’s opening track, with a questioning, bluesy figure introduction. In short order, he parts a veil of shimmering piano and vibraphone (Wollesen plays vibraphone as drum kit much of the time, which substantially shifts the weight and character of sound away from piano trio conventions), and then takes up a spare, abstracted tango rhythm. Over the next 20 minutes, musicians enter and exit the action. One trumpet takes up the querying vibe, and the other resolves it. The guitar floats dubby echoes over the pulse. Courvoisier darts out of the vibes at double speed, or complicates some brass harmonies with spare dissonant notes.
In other settings, such as her duo with Mary Halvorson, Courvoisier favors abruptness and density. Chimaera’s music is no less eventful. But it drifts instead of bursting, inviting the listener to surrender to a sequence of dissolutions, reconstitutions, and surprising elaborations across six compositions and 87 minutes of dream-like music.
“Dein Seelenverwandter lässt dich völlig intakt fühlen, als würde kein Stück aus dem Puzzle fehlen. Ein Lebenspartner, auf der anderen Seite kann es ein grossartiger Unterstützer und langjähriger Weggefährte sein, aber er ist auf ihre oder seine Fähigkeit begrenzt, deinen Geist zu bereichern.” ~
Dr. Carmen Harra
Solo reed albums used to be an uncommon commodity. Infrequent were the improvisers like Anthony Braxton who embraced the format as means of early trailblazing expression; his sea changing For Alto on the Delmark label set an early benchmark. Since that pinnacle it’s become a rite of passage that reedists reconcile at various points in their careers. Solitary clarinet ventures are historically even scarcer. The pandemic changed all of that, making in-person musical production outside of the immediate household a potentially hazardous prospect. Left largely to their own devices over the past sixteen-months, reedists of all shapes, sizes and proclivities have taken to the form. Solo projects from this period by Dave Rempis, J.D. Allen, John Butcher and others are in the pipeline or already in the public marketplace. Light Line aligns gamely and germanely with that esteemed number.
Chris Speed’s been around a good while as a bandleader, improviser and sideman. An early post in Tim Berne’s Blood Count and other projects demanded both chops and creativity that carried over into a dozen other contexts. Clarinet’s been an ongoing, if arguably secondary, concern across that through line. A pull quote from colleague Anthony Burr gracing the album tray copy distills the aegis behind the effort: “an undying commitment to melody in some elemental sense as the primary element in music.” Speed mostly eschews elaborate displays of technique, preferring instead to bask in the melodic properties of the meticulously chosen song list as filtered through the limpid aural idiosyncrasies of his instrument. The opening title piece is a bracing case in point and an endearing exercise in fluttering, flickering chiaroscuro.
Original pieces intersperse with the selections from Speed’s pantheon of influences. All adhere to modest temporal limits that make them worthy of jukebox consideration. Themes and associative variations dance by like colorful airborne acrobats. “Drifting” and “Sphasos Triem” borrowed from Speed’s colleagues Skuli Sverrisson and Andrew D’Angelo, respectively, display intervallic dexterity that’s by turns dizzying and grin-inducing. Eric Dolphy’s “Miss Ann” is similarly steeped in terpsichorean leaps, this time circling a more constricted tonal center. “Rites” by Julius Hemphill prefaces a four-tune succession of originals starting with the “Cat Heaven,” which harkens to Mingus’ “Canon” in its gently fibrillating theme. Speed arguably saves the best for last with the parting one-two punch of Coltrane’s seraphic “Sunship” and Paul Motian’s haunting ballad “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago.”
