Volume 28 Issue 4 | February - March 2023

and Edgard Varèse’s death. Familiar tidbits are
superimposed into fragmented short upbeat
modern sounds.
The BBC orchestral commission I’d Love
to Turn… quotes The Beatles, Ligeti and Terry
Riley. This studio recreation combines orchestral
sounds with electronics, creating new
music embedded in popular music.
Oswald quotes from around 40 piano scores
in brief fragments, up to four simultaneously,
in the Marc-André Hamelin solo piano
commission Tip (2022). A calm, classicalflavoured
opening leads to chords, flourishes,
runs and rhythms. Love the evocative highpitched
ringing sections.
Varèse, Zappa and 1960s music are featured
in reFuse. Oswald’s ear-catching talent to
keep a work moving with fragmented interchanging,
superimposed live instruments and
electronic quotes and effects drive this “name
that tune” work. Bonus tracks highlights
are live Hamelin rehearsal Tip, and Turning
Point Ensemble reFuse performances. Oswald
reinvents Ligeti, Zappa and Varèse each separately
on three additional tracks.
The more one listens to Oswald’s memorable
music here, the more one hears
and loves.
Tiina Kiik
Something in the Air
Adding a Real Gallic Flavor when Creating French Jazz
KEN WAXMAN
Perhaps it’s related to the storied freedom of 1920s Paris where a
Black entertainer like Josephine Baker could become a superstar,
or the French pre-and-post Second World War intellectuals who
wrote learnedly about jazz when it was still scorned in North America,
but improvised music in France took longer to assert its own national
identity than in other countries. With successive waves of foreign
musicians making their homes there, local musicians became the
most proficient Europeans playing styles ranging from Dixieland to
Hard Bop. That has changed for the better since the 1970s. Since free
jazz/improvised music accepted musical influences from all over,
unique Gallic sounds began coming to the forefront. Folkloric
influences from the countryside, advanced notated and electric/
acoustic experiments and melodies from France’s former colonies
became accepted. As these discs demonstrate, while it’s impossible to
exactly define jazz from France, in its best iteration it’s certainly not an
imitation of North American models.
Along with others such as Jacques Thollot
and François Tusques, keyboardist Jef
Gilson (1926-2012) was one of the first Gallic
musicians to incorporate free improvisations
into straight-ahead jazz. However, by 1974
when Workshop (Souffle Continu FFL 075
CD soufflecontinurecords.com) was
recorded, his music was individual since it
was also influenced by the ethnic sounds
Gilson had heard and played during an extended Madagascar sojourn.
The two lengthy tracks here reflect that. On one hand co-leader alto
saxophonist Philippe Maté (1939-2002), projects the multiphonic
sweeps of spiritual free jazz while percussionists, bassists and
keyboardists create a highly rhythmic underpinning that propels and
accents the narratives. Bruno Di Gioia’s baying English horn adds
another element to the extended Vision, while his and Maurice
Bouhana’s dual flute interludes contribute Third World hues to both
tracks, amplified by drum pounding, cow bell whacks, cymbal
shaking and keyboard glissandi. The varied keyboards played by
Gilson and Pierre Moret also serve as linkage between percussion
rhythm and Maté’s unfettered free jazz. Moving among spiky bites,
energetic overblowing and smeared multiphonics, the saxophonist’s
output frequently ascends to prestissimo and staccato timbres.
Juddering rumbles from one electric keyboard keeps the saxophonist
from straying too far from the exposition in those cases, and Gilson’s
jazz-inflected electric piano accents complement lyrical asides in the
saxophonist’s more relaxed moments.
Jump forward almost five decades and this
electro/acoustic mixture is also expressed
by 40-year-old pianist Eve Risser. Except
in this case the polyrhythmic weaving
expressed by her eight-part suite on
Eurythmia (Clean Feed CF 609 CD cleanfeed-records.com)
is interpreted by the
12-piece Red Desert Orchestra instead of
Gilson’s septet. Its classic sound is achieved
by adding specific modulations played by
African and Levantine qarqabas, balafons, djembes and baras to the
orchestra’s Western electric and acoustic instruments. Although some
of the tracks are more so-called European and some more so-called
ethnic, creative melding is the most prominent take away. In fact,
it’s the concluding Soyayya which puts this in the boldest relief.
Picking up the relentless percussion beats of the previous track, with
dancing cross rhythms and balafon strokes most prominent, harmonized
riffs from the five-piece horn section are heard as speckled electronic
oscillations also come to the fore. As the percussion pops and
shakes continue, Antonin-Tri Hoang’s alto saxophone takes apart
and reconnects the theme with fluttering squeals. Finally, these and
other textures fade into Tatiana Paris’ lyrical guitar coda. Later her
voice along with Risser’s harmonize with the reeds on Desert Rouge
providing balance to the bent notes and multiple cross rhythms
from the percussionists, while trumpeter Nils Ostendorf and trombonist
Mathias Müller blow mariachi-like triplets that settle on top of
the undulating groove. Ever present, the surging percussion raps are
prominent throughout the disc. Yet between pianist Risser’s carefully
positioned repeated patterns and chording control, the performances
are prevented from becoming techno-trance music. Furthermore, in
spite of standout solos, especially from Müller on Gämse, which blasts
up the scale and down again with an emphasized collection of halfvalve
slurs, slides, shakes and plunger grumbles, Eurythmia never
becomes a singular jazz-improv session, but inhabits its own idiosyncratic
niche.
68 | February & March, 2023 thewholenote.com