DON CHERRY & IRENE SCHWEIZER: MUSICAL MONSTERS (INTAKT)

 The Guardian - 9th September 2016

Jazz

Don Cherry / Irène Schweizer: Musical Monsters review – technical class and experimental appetite

3 / 5 stars

(Intakt)

Marking history … the Swiss piano virtuoso Irène Schweizer, who called for the release of the Willisau tapes for Musical Monsters. Photograph: Markus di Francesco

By John Fordham

This encounter between world-jazz trumpet legend Don Cherry, Danish-American alto saxophonist John Tchicai, Swiss piano virtuoso Irène Schweizer, bassist Léon Francioli and percussionist Pierre Favre had been buried in the vaults since the original performance at Switzerland’s Willisau festival in 1980. Schweizer recently heard the tapes and called for their release as a unique document in the story of European free jazz. Loosely based on sketchy arrangements the five cooked up in a pre-gig chat, it’s blustery, exhilarating music, in which minimal trumpet patterns become genially wayward Ornette Coleman-like motifs and fast bass-walks spark avant-swing sprints. Over these, Tchicai’s eerie violin-like alto soars, or the horns tussle above Favre’s hustling drums and Schweizer’s streaming runs. There’s a good deal of manically abstract vocalising as well as strutting slow marches like Albert Ayler band numbers. The track Musical Monsters 3 is approximately and unexpectedly danceable, and the unaccompanied solos demonstrate both the technical class and experimental appetites of all the players. It’s one for the free-jazzers, but a rare one.

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.

THE GUARDIAN - review: Schweizer & Favre: Live in Zürich

Irène Schweizer & Pierre Favre: Live in Zurich – review

(Intakt Records)

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• • John Fordham
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 12 December 2013 23.30 GMT
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Joyous openness … Irène Schweizer and Pierre Favre. Photograph: Francesca Pfeffer

1. 
2. Schweizer Favre
3. Live In Zürich
4. Intakt
5. 2013

Pianist Irène Schweizer and drummer and multi-instrumentalist Pierre Favre have travelled many roads over long careers in the outlands where high-level virtuosity and tireless improvisational urges meet. They first played together 45 years ago and renew an old partnership here on their third duo release for Intakt, the first having arrived in 1990. Even at the farthest improv extremes, the work of both musicians is marked by a pristine clarity, and Schweizer plays a great deal of engaging spontaneous melody, while Favre often affects a kind of louche, lolloping swing. The tracks are short, pithy and varied – from twitchy and eventually headlong pieces such as Black Mirror or the monkish Broken Notes, to the flying Gemini Constellation (where Schweizer sounds like Art Tatum morphing into Cecil Taylor). Slowly undulating sound collages turn dreamily melodic, and then thumpingly swinging, as in Bird of Paradise, while others become rhapsodic, intensifying meditations (Huben wie Druben) or rocking boogies (Night Flight). The two of them sound at the top of their game, and it's music-making of a joyous openness you certainly don't need to be a die-hard to hear.