This album is a milestone in the history of jazz and European improvised music. The first release by the trio Les Diaboliques featuring Irène Schweizer on piano, Maggie Nicols on vocals, and Joëlle Léandre is an artistically and historically significant document. With this release, the three musicians lay the foundation for thirty years of collaboration between what is arguably the most important working band of female musicians. The beginning of a new era in jazz.
Swiss author Isolde Schaad writes in the liner notes:
„This first CD by the trio Les Diaboliques with Irène Schweizer, piano, Maggie Nicols, vocals and Joëlle Léandre, bass, contains several pieces that contrapuntally set each other on fire, condense, overlap and link together. The result can be a larmoyant ironic elegy or a blasting furioso exit, depending on the inspiration of the moment. And this moment is so strong that it nullifies the peculiar quality of each individual instrument, detaching it from its normal usage: the trio sounds the retreat, even though there are no wind instruments, just piano, vocals and bass. Les Diaboliques not only accom¬plishes this, but also much more that goes beyond the individual medium.
For example, Maggie Nicols not only uses language melodically or pho¬netically, but also instrumentally, so to speak, or then she packs her voice with political dynamite. Joëlle is known to treat her double bass as if it were a person of respect. In her keyboard, Irène has the whole of jazz history at her disposal, from Ragtime and Blues to Bebop and Free Improvisation. As a result, the trio performs like an orchestra on this CD. Virtuose. At times it wraps itself in the cloak of a symphonic poem or, in the strongest passages, takes on the character of a comic opera.
There are long passages, sequences interwoven vocally, like a filigree etched with arabesques that are rich in nuance, transported by piano and bass, which prod it into a tem-peramental dialectical entwinement. The piano as a sturdy structure that provides the background, the great landscape of tonality for the rather solitary passages of vocals and bass.
The voice develops a musical timbre that includes everything a voice can do, from nursery rhymes to an aria and even to a prayer. A sociotope is inspected and illuminated, strange cultures are observed from up close and from far away, „gradually, gradually", as they say. In between, this amazing organ warbles, psal¬modizes, screetches and grates – down to the nerve of everyday and total suffering. The great lamento and the antique Erinys ring through in tremendous singing that is abruptly interrupted and hops into a giggle at the world. This is carried by tightly constructed, crystalline bubb¬ly passages and arpeggios on the piano. Now and then there is a sur¬prising consonant minor chord, a kind of syntactic measure, which then, as if the piano had to beg for pardon, sweeps into a lovely little waltz, which is intended to settle the voice down, back into childlike happiness, which is also possible.
At the beginning of a piece, the piano constructs the rhythmic structure, like a suggestion for a reliable ground and foundation for whatever mon¬stro¬sities may follow. On top of this, the voice and double bass place their coloratura, their contortions, their raptures. Léandre’s bass is well-known for its contortions, which should be understood literally – contortions that are musically «fit as a fiddle» and supple. Joëlle, the literary one of the three she-devils, plays her game with the kind of seriousness that animates the art of great comedians, a grave kind of earnestness moves her bow only suddenly to slide into free rumi¬nation. Joëlle’s bass here seems to be more restrained than usual, allowing Maggie’s voice to move to the fore where it comes to lie close to your ear.
The trio of three conspirators, two of whom had already begun to use the name Infernale a long time ago and who later joined together as three sisters again and again both in tone and in mind, reaches its musical peak here. Its playing has a perfect gesticulatory ductus, a performing mannerism that not only makes it music to listen to, but also to see and to touch. What is special about this listening pleasure is that an inner depth, a kind of feeling for the world is conveyed. Hiking in the mountains, crossing the desert or sitting in a traffic jam in a big city, and finally, perhaps a river flowing into the ocean, water that you can plunge into or merely dip your big toe in. For, and this is what is decisive, humor plays an important role for this trio. Especially when, following hot confessions, wild staccato or a political prophesy – „They will destroy you slowly (Social Democrats), they will destroy you quickly (Tories)" – , Maggie Nicols’ so-called global voice lands somewhere. Perhaps on a stone in the Sahara or in a French baby buggy or in an Arabian souk.
Irène Schweizer, piano, Maggie Nicols, vocals, Joëlle Léandre, bass: Three rebels in their field who have cultivated their rebellion until it reached the highest professional level over years of contrary indi¬viduality, which each of them alone is known for, and oh God, what are they like together! They are the pheno¬menal integration of contradiction, the live liest synthesis of being a female musician, which fulfills a strange expectation on this CD: to ignite the line and continuity of a playing together like a composition with the spontaneous element of improvisation. To saddle the elegant concert lady with the most vulgar vulgarities, so fabulously proletarian, as only Maggie Nicols can do, in several languages, in long torrents of words, accompanied by the piano. All in all it is, in a way of speaking, the score of experience that guides the trio, but it is the moment and its inspiration that decides how a piece will continue, which course it will take, its dramaturgy.
When three such experienced musical rebels come together to form a trio named Les Diaboliques, there is an element of conspiracy to it. What comes out of it is truly something new. I dare to use this word, for from the first moment on it is clear when you listen to this first CD where the three well-known musicians play together that something else came after Monk and Coltrane and it came from women. It is probably a question of the female ability to unfold in what a music critic once called «collective invention» in a way that is different to what men usually do. Namely, not in rivalry, but rather in reciprocal inspiration. And this primarily con-sists of human communication, here in voice and instrument, or both or the mutual allocations and musical functions that the three develop on the basis of their ability within the framework of sovereign freedom. Joëlle Léandre, for example, always performs with her bass as if it were an individual, human in both the good and bad sense, that also has among other characteristics the characte¬ristics of a string instrument. This is important to know, for Joëlle’s bass can emancipate itself to a clownesque autonomy that needs to be treated with sensitivity and respect, which this musician does in such cases in such a funny way you almost burst with laughter."
