SYLVIE COURVOISIER brings her own personal blend of Europe and America to the jazz piano trio
8:01 p.m. sharp on September 30 at Brooklyn's Roulette Intermedia, Sylvie Courvoisier launched her first COVID-era public concert for six masked, socially distanced witnesses in the balcony and a global livestream audience of thousands. Over the next 80 minutes, pianist Courvoisier, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Kenny Wollesen-operating with minimal rehearsal-performed one Courvoisier piece from the trio's 2018 CD D'Agala, then nine from the 2020 followup Free Hoops (Intakt), moving seamlessly in and out of written and improvised moments with breathe-as-one cohesion, impeccable execution, and creative mojo that belied their long separation.
Absent a world-upending pandemic, the trio soon thereafter would have flown to Europe for an October tour. But that trip was long since erased from Courvoisier's calendar, following 17 canceled European trio concerts in mid-March and early April, summer engagements performing John Zorn's Bagatelles, and five performances in May and June with the transformative
flamenco dancer Israel Galván of a program titled La Consagración de la Primavera, for which Courvoisier and Cory Smythe play two-piano arrangements of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, her own Spectro, and the co-composed Conspiracion. But Courvoisier is nothing if not resilient after three decades in the trenches. On October 2 she intended to fly to Switzerland, her homeland, where (after quarantine) she'd booked a series of last-minute gigs with primarily Swiss musicians, including a four-day trio residency in Vevey with drummer Julian Sartorius.
A few weeks before Roulette, Courvoisier recalled a March 10 program with Galván and Smythe in France, where COVID cases were spiking. "It was a big theater, packed, more than a thousand people, a lot of them coughing," she said. Courvoisier and Smythe flew to Zurich, where the Taktlos Festival, which she was curating, began on March 12. She'd invited such New York friends and collaborators as Uri Caine; guitarist Mary Halvorson, her partner on the well-wrought 2017 duo CD Crop Circles (Relative Pitch); and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey, who'd joined Courvoisier and violinist Mark Feldman on the collectively improvised 2019 release TISM (RogueArt).
Logistical chaos then ensued, as Courvoisier recounted: "Cory played solo. Mary flew back to New York from Geneva with the sextet, because Trump said he was closing the border. Uri canceled that same day. My trio was supposed to play on the last night. Drew was there, but Kenny called on the travel day to say he wasn't coming-Tom subbed for him. We did all the gigs through March 14, with half the audience, with separation, and a lot of hand sanitizer. Then we all went home."
A PROMINENT VOICE ON New York's speculative improv/creative music scene since she emigrated from Switzerland in 1998, Courvoisier, 52, has led or co-led about 30 albums. In addition to the aforementioned, these include vertiginously precise duet and quartet recitals with Feldman; a luminous chamber trio with Feldman and cellist Erik Friedlander; structurally cogent tabula-rasa improvs with Evan Parker, Ned Rothenberg, Ikue Mori, Joelle Leandre, Ken Vandermark, and Nate Wooley; and 1990s presentations with French cellist Vincent Courtois, Swiss percussionist Lucas Niggli, and Swiss pianist Jacques Demierre. She played John Zorn's ensemble music on Cobra-2002, Femina, and Dictée/Liber Novus, and duetted with Feldman on Zorn's Malphas: Book of Angels, Volume 3 and Masada Anniversary Edition, Volume 4. In 2007, Courvoisier made her first solo album, Signs and Epigrams (Tzadik), performing a cohort of compositions that showcased her virtuosic, rhythmically intricate pianistic language, crystallizing elements refracted from 20th-century classical music and jazz, with much room for improvisation. In 2014, she finally addressed the trio function with Gress and Wollesen on Double Windsor (Tzadik).
"I've loved piano trio since my teens, and I've written my own music since I was little, but I was always scared to deal with the weight of the past of trio history," Courvoisier says. "To have your own voice in the piano trio is really hard."
"The piano trio is done to death, but Sylvie is breathing new life into it," says pianist Kris Davis, a Courvoisier admirer since the early '00s. "Her thing is linear in a Sylvie way. It can jump all over the place. It can be angular. It can be atonal. It incorporates dynamics. She often cuts from one idea to a totally different one. What she does is speech-like, with disjunct phrases and then quick passages with everything intertwined right under the hand. It isn't necessarily melodic in the sense of what a layperson thinks of as melodic, but because she's so rhythmic she can pull it off."
"She's a really compelling classical pianist," says Smythe, who heard Courvoisier for the first time at a 2004 concert an...