Ezz-thetics a column by Joëlle Léandre has, by any standard, made a tremendous contribution to contemporary music, since first working with composers John Cage and Giacinto Scelsi. Entering the realm of improvised music, she immediately established herself as a significant voice amongst equals, her early collaborations including a 1982 concert, 28 rue Dunois juillet 82 (Fou), in quartet with Derek Bailey, George Lewis, and Evan Parker. There were the trios as well, with pianist Ingrid Schweizer and vocalists: Les Diaboliques with Maggie Nicols and another with Annick Nozati. Whatever its form, Léandre’s work has been marked by passion and vision. Léandre’s career has warranted and received special attention. In 2002, Francesco Martinelli devoted a volume in his distinguished series of discographies to Léandre’s work (Bandecchi & Vivaldi Editore). In 2011, Kadima Collective in Israel published Solo. An English translation of a book of interviews with Franck Médiori that first appeared in French as A voix basse (Broché, 2008), the Kadima edition included a solo CD recorded in 2005 and a DVD of another solo performance from the 2009 Guelph Jazz Festival. In 2016, the Polish label Not Two released an 8-CD set called A Woman’s Work. It documented multiple aspects of her work, from solo, to Les Diaboliques, to duets with Mat Maneri, Lauren Newton, Jean-Luc Cappozzo, and Fred Frith, to a quartet with Zlatko Kaučič, Evan Parker, Agustí Fernández, and a CD of duets with each member of the group. In recent years, Léandre’s work may have achieved even greater focus and emotional power. For this writer, her 2021 CD At Souillac en Jazz: Live in Calès’ Church (reviewed in PoD #78) marked a highpoint in solo bass improvisation, her impassioned blend of instrumental and voice creating a special spiritual force. Christian Pouget’s near-contemporaneous film, Joëlle Léandre: Duende (released on DVD by Films UtôpïK), is more powerful still. Filmed in part in a primeval forest in which the trees suggest they might travel by night and in the seeming wreckage of a mine, Léandre becomes herself the voice of this world, bowing, plucking, and vocalizing with an emotive force that can suggest Charles Mingus. Joëlle Léandre: Lifetime Rebel (RogueArt) In 2023, Léandre was selected by New York’s Vision Festival as the recipient of its annual Lifetime Achievement Award, joining other icons such as Amina Claudine Myers, Andrew Cyrille, Peter Brötzmann, Sam Rivers, Milford Graves, Wadada Leo Smith, and Oliver Lake On the night of the award, Léandre performed in four different contexts: in two distinct trios, as leader and composer of a work for octet and in duet with poet Fred Moten. It’s remarkable recognition for a European artist in America. The work in hand, Lifetime Rebel, is a four-CD, one-DVD set. The CDs document the performances that accompanied the award presentation at Art for Art’s Sake’s June 2023 festival at Roulette in Brooklyn. A press release from the spring of 2023, from ties together much of this work. The DVD contains Christian Pouget’s film Joëlle Léandre: Struggle, Life, Music which debuted in a livestream-only, fund-raising event for the Lifetime Achievement award. It’s one of the better documentaries produced about an improvising musician. Three of the CDs feature short performances from the Award’s night – Tiger Trio, with flutist Nicole Mitchell and pianist Myra Melford; Roaring Tree with pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri; a duet with Léandre and poet Fred Moten. The sets are generally brief as one might expect on such a night, and that brevity contributes to the special intensity, from roughly 20 minutes to a half-hour. Each performance is electric, an immediate immersion in an ensemble’s creative potential. The Tiger Trio makes emotionally expressive music, whether intense, playful or both, immediately challenging ideas of category as the members’ formal intelligence asserts itself: Mitchell’s flute and Léandre’s bass dovetail with Melford’s cascading piano on the opening “Tiger Trio #1” or the way Mitchell and Léandre seem at times to be working backwards toward form on the duet of “#2.” On “#4,” Léandre matches Melford’s pointillism with a combination of vocal plosives and grunt-like bowing in the bass’s lowest register. On occasion, Mitchell and Léandre expand their expressive possibilities with vocalizing. The three are always making sonic architecture, but it grows ever more intense and expressive until the concluding pieces, “#5” and “#6.” There are uncanny high-pitched passages in these pieces in which Mitchell seems to be alternating singing and playing flute, while “#6” has an extraordinary dream-like quality rooted in the juxtaposition of high and low voices, Mitchell’s soaring flute, the factory-floor grit of Leandre’s bass patterns and the continuous weave of Melford’s piano. Roaring Tree is similarly virtuosic, beginning in quiet counterpoint, each musician gradually developing more discontinuous materials in a broadening of the expressive field, including Maneri’s abstracted exploration of microtonality. There’s a special brilliance to the trio’s free counterpoint, a kind of creative unity that does not require uniformity or echo, but instead finds a kind of abstracted empathy in which parts combine in a complex soundscape. There’s a kind of ideal equivalence in a duet of viola and bass in “Roaring Tree #2” in which parts are somehow complementary in simultaneity rather than direct reflection, again an expansion of the compositional field. Alternatively, disjunct phrases can somehow assemble within the frame of Taborn’s pyrotechnic runs to happily end in a kind of wild synchronicity at the piece’s conclusion. Similarly abstracted synchronicity – the trio’s forte - drives the centripetal merger of “#3.” At the Roulette event, Léandre also performed an extended composition for septet called Atlantic Ave. #1. Likely wisely, given its complexity and demands, it’s heard not in its New York debut, but in a performance from Vincennes, France in January 2024 with the same stellar ensemble that was present in New York. Léandre is joined by saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, trombonist Steve Swell, guitarist Joe Morris, and a complementary string ensemble of violinist Jason Hwang, violist Mat Maneri, and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. Léandre is an adventurous exponent of mixed methodologies, and Atlantic Ave. #1 joins previous extended works like Can You Here Me? (ezz-thetics, PoD #34) in her oeuvre. Atlantic Ave. #1 is filled with contrasting textures, initially marked in the work’s opening by shifts between a detailed instrumental composition repeatedly breaking up into incomprehensible vocal chatter; a sustained composed segment for the strings is occasionally overshadowed by Morris’s hard-edged, spontaneous electric guitar. Shortly thereafter Laubrock and Swell combine to suggest a passage of “cool school” jazz against the string ensemble’s abstracted dissonances. It’s a brilliant sequence of intriguing collisions, including an extended a capella improvisation filled with randomizing scrapes and glissandi from Lonberg-Holm that leads to another passage of through-composed strings. A beautiful pastoral passage involving most of the ensemble is ultimately menaced by the guitar’s rhythmic intrusions, reasserting the work’s complexity. As it approaches its conclusion, new textures continue to arise, from an outbreak of shouting street voices, to passages in which improvisation and score are both complex and complementary and an ultimate passage in which Léandre solos and sings against the gathering ensemble. Atlantic Ave. #1 is precisely the sum of its parts, an engaging work that explores a terrain of its own as well as an Atlantic Ave. street scene, a compound sampler of Léandre’s art that’s alternately serene, raucous and inviting. The most unusual recording here is the duet with the poet Fred Moten, reading and expanding on poems drawn from his collection hughson’s tavern. His words and images are at once brilliant and violent, shattered episodic narratives that can extend to spontaneous variations and brief repeats. It’s a poetry made for musical dialogue, whether he is reciting a litany of great bassists (“Ronnie Boykins ... Wilbur Ware ... Ray Brown ... Fred Hopkins ... James Jamerson”), pressing a short phrase into melody, singing some of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” until it turns into his own spoken words, calling out great (and neglected) tenor saxophonists (Johnny Griffin and Paul Gonsalves) or ending with a rhyming pattern that acknowledges the Vision Fest hosts and founders (“Patricia and William”) and Joëlle Léandre as well. Moten’s hughson’s tavern is a world made for Léandre’s own interactive commentary. She deploys a range of techniques to create an advanced bass string-drum that surrounds, supports, and propels Moten’s exalted utterance, whether it’s a strange plucked polyrhythmic stutter, drumming on the body of the bass along with plucked open strings, bowing a drone of harmonics while plucking accents, or finding other strange multiplicities of technique and then combining them all with her own inspired vocal wail in a kind of prelude or frame to prophecy. Completing the package is that DVD of Joëlle Léandre: Struggle, Life, Music. It consists of an interview filmed in one take in a bucolic setting in Southern France that has been intercut with bass solos recorded in a sunlit home. The collaborators are on-going supporters of Léandre’s work: the interviewer is Michel Dorbon, producer of Rogueart; poet-filmmaker Christian Pouget shot the film; the sound was recorded by Jean-Marc Foussat of Fou Records. It’s an engaging portrait of one of improvised music’s defining personalities.
© 2024 Stuart Broomer
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