Sylvie Courvoisier: Eclats - Live in Europe

Sylvie Courvoisier has never been easy to pin down, which is exactly the point. The Lausanne-born pianist moved to New York City in 1998 and spent the next two-plus decades making herself indispensable to the downtown avant-garde, working alongside John Zorn, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and Mark Feldman, among others. She received the Swiss Grand Prix Music and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, recognition that felt overdue rather than surprising. Her long-running piano trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen has been one of jazz's most formidable units for years. Éclats: Live in Europe, recorded during a February 2025 tour, makes a strong case that the group has never sounded better.

The opener, "Éclats -for Ornette," comes out swinging. Courvoisier does not genuflect at Ornette Coleman's altar so much as tear the door off it. "Just Twisted" is knotted and physical, a theme the trio seems to be assembling and dismantling in the same breath, a form of controlled chaos that never tips into self-indulgence. The pianist's circular and staggered bop maneuvers ride atop a rock-like riff, while Gress provides a steady undertow, leading to a complex rupture and a regenerative stream of ideas within the trio's engaging improvisations.

The album's emotional center settles around "Requiem d'un songe," featuring Courvoisier's brisk voicings and rapid post-bop bursts. Shifting currents eventually guide the band toward a voice that is striking in the way that unsettling things sometimes are. "Imprint Double" breaks that spell with a relentless, tumbling drive, blending rock grooves with boogie-woogie inflections, reflective passages, and generous doses of absorbing improvisation.

"Big Steps Towards Silence" is patient in a way that demands attention rather than rewarding distraction, unfolding as a dense three-way call-and-response exchange that converges toward near silence, followed by rising mini-motifs that alternate with quieter passages. Here, Wollesen steps forward with a series of polyrhythmic conversations, steering the band back to the primary melody. "Lulu's Dance" carries a stalking, muscular quality, guided by the pianist's imagery of climbing a ladder, accented by the rhythm section's sweeping sound sculptures and several false endings that return the group to the subtle state introduced at the outset.

Courvoisier has always played as if the stakes are high. Here, they feel even higher, and Gress and Wollesen meet her at every turn. This is a trio firing on all cylinders with no interest in easing up.

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