Pulsating cadences at the apex of jazz

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1968, the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier had a conventional enough classical music education in conducting, composition and piano at the Conservatoire de Lausanne before moving to Brook-lyn in 1998, where she dived deeply into jazz, developing a number of musical formations, including two remarkable trios.
Abaton included her husband, the Chicagoan violinist Mark Feldman and cellist Erik Friedlander, and the all-woman Mephista was created with the veteran French bassist Joelle Leandre and US-Filipina drummer Susie Ibarra.
One of her first of a series of albums for the Swiss label Intakt was Lonelyville, recorded in her home city in 2006.
With Feldman and Courvoisier are the Detroit African-American drummer Gerald Cleaver, the Parisian cellist Vincent Courtois and the Tokyo-born Ikue Mori on electronics.
Feldman's ice-hot strings are at the centre of the 22-minute opener, Texturologie.
They cut through the harmonies above Courtois's more temperate cello and Courvoisier's grounding notes, while Cleaver's scattering drums keep the music earthen and solid.
Courvoisier rides her keys, buck-ing their wild sounds in a sudden thumping solo with Mori's tinkling timbral currents seething around her.
Cosmorama reflects the four con. tinents of the musicians but also the unity between the electric and the acoustic in Courvoisier and Mori's opening palaver.
Cello and violin have their moments of colloquy and Feldman touches the stars in his solo beside Courtois's pizzicato artistry.
If you wanted proof that these are so powerful contemporary jazz instruments, listen to Cosmorama.
Mori's sounds, like dripping crystal water, enfold Courvoisier's notes in Contraste 2005 before Feldman's serene unaccompanied solo, and the final, title track, with Cleaver's rumbling drums and Courvoisier's strident chords, has the bleak aura of a Lausanne blues.
By 2009 Courvoisier and Feldman were co-leading a lasting quartet with the Californian bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer from New Haven, Connecticut, Gerry Hemingway, a leader in his own right and collaborator with Anthony Braxton, Marilyn Crispell and Wadada Leo Smith.
Their album To Fly to Steal was recorded in New York in July 2009. The bold drama of the opener, Messianenesque, is a sonic dance between the four instruments, with Feldman's spiky violin moving and sounding like the lone horn.
The pictorial soundscape of Whispering Glades is of a saltwater marsh at sunset suddenly disturbed by human presence.
Morgan's bass digs into the sodden earth.
Another audio-visual impression is Coastlines, with Feldman painting the margins of land and sea and Courvoisier's pounding notes stressing their jeopardy.
Feldman's quicksilver bow and Courvoisier's frolicsome runs mark The Good Life, with Five Senses of Keen exposing the violinist's melodicism and intense lyricism beside Hemingway's quiescent booms and Morgan's empathetic throbs.
Courvoisier's jerking, stop-start avenues of sound are at the worrisome heart of Fire, Fist and Bestial Wail.
By 2013, the quartet had two new members, with veteran New York drummer Billy Mintz replacing Hemingway and Angelang bassist Scott Collev in for Morgan, and they came together to cut the album Birdies for Lulu in New York in November of that year.
The opener and closer is Feldman's three-part Cards for Capitaine, dedicated to a late Swiss friend and written on index cards which were arbitrarily shuffled immediately before the recording.
Nothing mournful and full of zany humour with Colley's breathless bass brilliantly setting the pace.
Feldman's violin stomps and wails, Courvoisier's serpentine waves of sound roll and Mintz's drums shuffle, saunter and stroll.
From the heart of Europe to the apex of jazz she came, innovating all the way.
Hear her all the way through, but especially on this album's hearts-blood track, Shmear, where her pulsating cadences and sprints up the keyboard are joy to the ears.
Jazz brings many human miracles, and Switzerland in Brooklyn on a rocking piano is one of them.

Swiss-born, New York-based pianist Sylvie Courvoisier can be hard to pin down. She covers a wide gamut with equal conviction, from jazz-inflected riffs to airy romanticism, via arrhythmic improv and chamber abstraction, enacted both at the keyboard and within the guts of the piano. With so much terrain at her disposal, it's no wonder that she boasts such a breadth of collaborators, stretching from Lotte Anker to John Zorn, with over 30 leadership dates in her discography.

However, surprisingly, she hadn't tackled the piano trio until, at Zorn's behest, she put together the group on Double Windsor of bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Juxtapositions of contrasting elements form an important strand in Courvoisier's work, whether they be of mood, meter or texture. It's clear she has chosen her partners well as they make the continual switchbacks appear natural and unforced. With his rich sound and strong melodic sense allied to rhythmic nous, Gress helps ensure that Courvoisier's mysterious charts, full of unexpected twists and turns, remain anchored in the jazz tradition. In that he's aided by Wollesen's mastery of timbre and broken grooves, which lengthen and play with time, bending it to the
group will. They get things off to a fine start on the title number as a darkly rolling ostinato, which achieves thrilling immediacy when doubled by bass and piano, alternating with pensive ruminations. It cuts to a melancholy bowed bass melody that seems to be from a different piece entirely, prior to a return of the opening gambit to finish what must be one of the piano trio tracks of the year. There's little sign of a dip thereafter either, as solos and improvisation are so well incorporated into the ingenious writing that they can escape notice, so integral are they to the magnificence of the overall flow.

That same love of juxtaposition becomes a credo, seemingly shared by the whole outfit, in Courvoisier's quartet with husband/violinist Mark Feldman on Birdies for Lulu. Only here the range of interjections is wider still with more of an even split between jazz, contemporary classical and improv tropes. It's most obvious on the four parts of Feldman's "Cards For Capitaine", created by giving instructions/notation on a series of cards, randomly reordered prior to performance. The first part features a "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"-type shuffle while subsequent installments offset open interaction with fast scuttling rhythms and delicately strummed piano strings and plaintive violin. Drummer Billy Mintz' "Schmear" continues the thesis as a folksy dash abruptly switches first to churchy piano chords then to later sections showcasing Feldman's husky violin and Courvoisier's rollercoaster piano. After a captivating intro in which Courvoisier counterbalances prepared and unprepared segments of the keyboard, Feldman's lovely "Natarajasana" evokes Arvo Pärt's "Fratres" in its combination of mournful violin and somber hymnal, briefly illuminated by bassist Scott Colley's tuneful pizzicato. In fact, every composition is both complex and multi-faceted, exquisitely executed with sly humor amid the pathos and charm.