John Fordham / The Guardian: Pierre Favre DrumSight Review

Jazz

Pierre Favre DrumSight (INTAKT Records) Review

 THE GUARDIAN, John Fordham

Antonio Sanchez’ acclaimed drum score for last year’s Birdman movie has alerted a wider audience up to how expressive all-percussion music can be. This album features a dozen pieces composed by the 79-year-old Swiss percussion marvel Pierre Favre for his DrumSights quartet. Favre made an ECM album called Singing Drums in 1984, and he still leads groups that layer multiple rhythms with a warmth and vocal-toned naturalness that hides their astonishing complexity. Brushes-dominated pieces are ruthlessly badgered by bass-drum booms and woody tappings; deep fusions of conga and tom-tom rhythms ring and chime with metallic upper sounds; rubbery, racing-heart rhythms are pursued by thundering hooves; and there are byzantine conversations on taxing meters like the 5-6-5-5 pattern of the brittle, chattery Pow Wow. Every track has character, but the almost 10-minute Games (originally written for the African djembe), a mix of soft and hard sounds, martial, sensuous, relaxed or breakneck grooves, could be a sampler for the whole remarkable venture.

JAZZ: Sylvie Courvoisier, Mark Feldman, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori - Miller’s Tale / 4 Star review John Fordham THE GUARDIAN

Sylvie Courvoisier, Mark Feldman, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori: Miller’s Tale review – mesmerising free improv

The partnership of Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and American violinistMark Feldman has spanned most variations of sharp-end jazz over the years, but the quartet on this all-improv session is one of their loosest, featuring British sax innovator Evan Parker and Japanese electronics artist and percussionist Ikue Mori. There are four group pieces, and five for various duets. The opening Death of a Salesman’s creaking-door sounds mixed with straight-violin delicacies and agitated free-percussion takes no prisoners, but the flighty dances of Parker’s soprano sax with Feldman’s spinning falsetto lines and the thriller-movie poundings of the finale are lyrical and dramatic. Quiet piano-string pluckings shadow rapturous slow-bowed tones; piano improv hurtles over whooshing, rustling percussion; dreamy violin arias are swept into free-sax meditations. Feldman’s duet with Mori’s twinkly electronic tones, Parker’s jazzy tenor-sax dialogue with Courvoisier and the latter’s delicate finale with Mori are duet highlights of a set that shows just how sonically mesmerising and musical free-improv can be. JOHN FORDHAM