Ce n’est pas la première fois – et pas la dernière espérons-nous – que la pianiste suisse Sylvie Courvoisier croise le fer avec le vétéran de l’AACM Wadada Leo Smith. Mais c’est leur premier duo sur Intakt. En fait il ne s’agit pas d’un duel, bien au contraire, car ces deux fabuleux musiciens donnent l’impression de s’émerveiller l’un à côté de l’autre des possibilités qui les conduisent à tisser ensemble une telle tapisserie musicale. Allez voir ce qu’écrit Yves Dorison, il vous fera sentir mieux que moi l’absolue beauté de leur musique. (Cf.Culturejazz, L’Appeal des Nouveautés, 01/11/2025). Mais comme j’y souscris totalement, je ne vais pas me priver de m’extasier à mon tour devant leur œuvre commune.

https://www.culturejazz.fr/spip.php?article4517

2017年にジョン・ゾーン主宰の公演で初共演したクールヴォワジェとスミスは、デュオ、トリオ、ピアノ2台といった編成でライヴを継続し、スミスがクールヴォワジェの2023年発表作『Chimaera』に参加するなど、本作へと至る流れは必然だったと言える。全8曲は録音順の配置になっており、内部演奏やプリペアード仕様を含むピアノと、ロング・トーンに衰えないエネルギーが漲るトランペットによる超世代対話は、想像以上にスムーズ。①を助走とするならば、②はいきなり緊張感が溢れる丁々発止のやり取りで、スリリングな空間を現出する。

https://pjportraitinjazz.com/playlists/20251230_9253/

While improvised piano-trumpet duets go back to Louis Armstrong’s and Earl Hines’ “Weatherbird” of 1928, balancing the four valves and 88 keys is a delicate challenge. The 21st century iterations here could be linked to abstract paintings. American trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s and Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier’s Angel Falls creates a subtle version of abstract expressionists’ splashes of color canvases, whereas Japanese, pianist Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura’s Ki is more like a monochrome painting which demands closer scrutiny to discern musical nuances

Courvoisier and Smith are experienced duo performers. Smith, whose career goes back to the late 1960s, has worked with pianists as different as John Tilbury and Vijay Iyer. Almost three decades younger, Courvoisier’s duet partners include Ned Rothenberg and Mark Feldman, but never a trumpeter until now. The two have been linked in large ensembles as part of Smith’s extensive catalogue though. Interestingly enough among those sessions was a quartet with Fujii and Tamura. Ki is the 10th duo the other two have recorded and while Tamura usually records with Fujii, on her own she has recorded duos with everyone from Otomo Yoshihide to Joe Fonda.

While also maintaining a painterly straight line, Courvoisier and Smith append numerous splashes of improvisational color as their disc evolves with extended techniques such as the pianist twanging the instrument’s inner strings and Smith creating brassy triplets, half valve slurs and protracted flutters. Occasionally as on “Sonic Utterance” light brass pitches and delicate formalist key glissandi are emphasized. But most tracks are rougher and more intense.

The title track for example evolves as additional reverb from string strums meet breezy brass slurps that slowly inflate to full force romanticism before energetically fragmenting into thinning trumpet squeaks and stinging keyboard clips. In contrast the probing aural brush strokes which shade “Line Through Time” extend short wavering brass bites and piano key probes that with gouache-like effects widen the line into full keyboard emphasis and smeared brass notes.

Reflecting and completing the overall design, the open horn brass portamento and thematic key-and-string decorations from Courvoisier on the final “Kairos” reflect similar sketching on the introductory “Olo’Upnea and Lightning”.

If jagged lightning define much of Angel Falls, then Ki is more of a light rain by a married couple. Minimalist in artistry, the simple musical geomatric shapes were drawn by Tamura, who composed seven of the eight tracks. The results aren’t static however. Although overall Fujii’s touch is more serene and reflective than Courvoisier’s and Tamura’s solos are more fully rounded and horizontal than Smith’s, digressions include pointillist textures and half-valve squeaks from the trumpeter as well as dips into pedal point emphasis and jagged key slashes from the pianist.

Experience plus marriage means that tracks like “Kusunoki” include moderated antiphonic connections with every key stroke carefully outlined and portamento echoes combining into trumpet grace notes and restful piano comping. Other such as “Arakashi” and “Icho” reflect the dispassionate lyricism that moves with warm reverberating keyboard pumps and vibrating trumpet grace notes duets closer to delicate brush painting than abstract art’s scattershot washes. Yet even those tunes that emphasize widening keyboard sweeps and low pitch tremors plus wallowing immersive breaths encompass relaxed linear evolution.

Like broad visual art awareness, the individual and distinct ways each duo illustrated its program demands respect and recognition.

https://www.jazzword.com/reviews/sylvie-courvoisier-wadada-leo-smith/

ANY jazz listeners have affirmed, that in the long wake of the John Coltrane Quartet, the foursome that has since most touched their brilliance is the English quartet, Mujician. Composed of the Bristolian pianist Keith Tippett, the south London tenor and soprano saxophonist Paul Dunmall, Luton-born seven-string bassist Paul Rogers and the Shropshire drummer, Tony Levin.

Between 1990 and 2005 they waxed six memorable albums on the US Cuneiform label, but now a triple CD has been created by Jazz in Britain, recorded from concerts in Cheltenham (1993), Vienna (2003) and Birmingham (2010). It is a beautiful sonic triptych called Mujician in Concerts, with the four members playing at their unified peak.

Sometimes haunting and hymnal as if coming from ancestral spirits — as in the opening message of Dunmall and Tippett in Cheltenham, othertimes rhapsodic and joyous: “We never spoke about the music beforehand,” declared Dunmall, “we just walked on stage and trusted in the music and each other.”

Rogers is a virtuoso bassist like no other, playing an instrument like no other, and Levin’s sense of time and moment is deeply empathetic, knowing instinctively the musical minds of his quartet-mates. Tippett and Levin are gone, but thanks to devoted and skilled travelling recordists, Andy Isham and Steve Trent, these long and precious musical instants are still with us, throbbing with life and artistry.

Between 1959 and 1970, Washingtonian tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse (1924-88) was the featured horn of Thelonious Monk’s Quartet, and his husky, quasi-adenoidal tone became the companion sound to Monk’s genius melodies and “brilliant corners.” But he showed another sphere when he recorded Cinnamon Flower in 1977, an album full of sounds of Brazil. The new reissue on Resonance Records includes this release with some overdubbing, plus the tracks in their undubbed, original form.

So we have a Latin feast of Rouse with Brazilian compadres trumpeter Claudio Roditi, pianist Dom Salvador and drummer Portinho, plus the great Michigan-born bassist Ron Carter, late of the Miles Davis Quintet. Rouse is joyous, in another element, on Cinnamon Flower, buoyed up by a relentless rhythmic upsurge and melodic beauty, for example on Desencontro (Disenchantment), and his notes leap up blissfully on Alvorada. It’s a powerful reissue, racked with elation and flair.

The great Mississippi-born trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith is 84 this year, but it hasn’t curtailed his mighty breath. His new album is Angel Falls (Intakt Records), partnered with the Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, whose pianism he describes as “advancing as if she’s going there to save creation.” In the destructive era of Trump and Musk that is certainly what they are both doing, with power and beauty too. Wadada’s horn talks fire and Courvoisier’s keyboard words make a palaver of freedom. No wonder one track is called Sonic Utterance, for that is what the entire album is.

Finally there is the burning saxophonist of Canterbury, the late Tony Coe. In 1977 his quintet, Axel, recorded the tracks of What Say We Play Today? (Jazz in Britain Records) at the Camden Jazz Festival. It’s taken 48 years, but now it’s there for us.

Pianist Gordon Beck, guitarist Phil Lee, bassist Chris Laurence and drummer Bryan Spring join Coe for a gripping performance, with the final title track reaching 28 minutes. Throughout, sheer musicianship excels, with the luminous, underrated Lee taking on the prominence of a second horn, and Coe playing clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones as if he were born to each. The fivesome create their own inventive sound, driven by uniqueness.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/best-2025-jazz-albums

Pianist Sylvie Courvoisier teams up with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith for a collection of duets composed by the pair, seemingly on sight, judging by the spontaneity of the tunes. Smith has an immediately identifiable tone, strong and clear, and expresses it in a variety of ways here. He goes ito subtones around the pouncing chords on ”Sonic Uttereance” and squeezes out ideas like spitting out grapefruit seeds on ”A Line Through Time”. A muted horn gets Miles Davisy on “Whispering Images’ while he slurs and sputters around Courvoisier’s eerie twinkles during “Kairos”. Courvoisier probes darkly with the strings during “Ol’upnea and Lightning” and tinkle tinkles like a star under Smith’s popping declarations of “Vireo Bellii”. Musical volleys.

https://jazzweekly.com/2025/12/sylvie-courvoisier-wadada-leo-smith-angel-falls//

Putting the Accent on the 2
Piano and trumpet is not a common jazz format, though it draws a prestigious lineage back to the 1928 Louis Armstrong/Earl Hines matchup "Weatherbird." The best trumpet-and-piano duos here, however, range far from tradition.
One is Angel Falls (Intakt; ★★★½; 59:17) by Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. The album features eight succinct, vitally engaging pieces that, per the title, often recall the architectural natural beauty Smith explored on his album America's Natural Parks. Both players draw from large vocabularies, the trumpeter coursing through clarion calls, stutters, multiphonics, squirts, smudges, chortles and harmon-muted sighs and Courvoisier preparing the keyboard, sometimes sounding like a marimba or tinkling glass, and playing inside and outside the piano box. Silences and space define the music as much as the sounds it encloses. "Olo'Upnea And Lightning" manages both grandeur and delicacy. Minor and blue, "A Line Through Time" hangs in space, and "Vireo Belli" invokes the chattering bird of its namesake.

Sylvie Courvoisier & Wadada Leo Smith
Angel Falls
Intakt CD444 (CD, DL)
★★★★ EDITOR'S CHOICE
Sylvie Courvoisier (p) and Wadada Leo Smith (t). Rec. 2024
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has had significant pianist-duet partners in Amina Claudine Myers, Anthony Davis and Vijay Iyer – and now Swiss legend Sylvie Courvoisier joins that illustrious list.
As two artists who are at a 'later years peak', with each producing excellent work in many settings, Courvoisier and Smith sound entirely assured and receptive as they probe their way through a set that excels for both the breadth of ideas as well as the skill of execution.
On one hand the understatement, or rather strength of subtext, of a piece such as 'Whispering Images' is notable. Courvoisier's opening tremolo is like a ripple under Smith's muted cries, together evoking a vividly outdoor space but the arrival of offbeat string plucking and gravelly chords slant the atmosphere towards something dreamily sub-aquatic.
On the other hand, the variety of tempo and attack on 'Naomi Park', where the eighth and sixteenth motifs splutter and spurt, lends a rousing vigor to stop time traditions, while Courvoisier's independence of left and right hand lines simply adds to the structural whirlwind.
Electronic effects and prepared piano rustlings are deployed with finesse on occasion, bringing imaginary wind chimes into the air, but a single open note from Smith or a stark, densely voiced chord from Courvoisier are enough to bring intense emotion and grand virtuosity into alliance. Captivating music by two modern masters.

SYLVIE COURVOISIER/ WADADA LEO SMITH
ANGEL FALLS
Intakt
In einer gerade veröffentlichten Studie des Max-Planck-Instituts heißt es, musikalische Schönheit werde auf dreierlei Weise erlebt: als ruhige Ergriffenheit, freudige Erregung und gespannte Erwartung. Ob das Phänomen damit angemessen erfasst ist, sei dahingestellt, aber mit dem Ergebnis lässt sich etwas anfangen. Zum Beispiel kann man jetzt mit gutem Gewissen behaupten, bei der Duoaufnahme von Sylvie Courvoisier und Wadada Leo Smith handele es sich um schöne Musik reinsten Wassers. Die acht Titel sind emotional bewegend, auf stille Weise aufregend, und sie ziehen einen in ihren Bann, wie es eben nur schöne Dinge vermögen.
Das Ergreifende, dabei völlig Unsentimentale dieser im Studio improvisierten komponierten Musik ist nicht auf kurze, herausragende Episoden begrenzt; wer darin nach den berühmten »schönen Stellen« sucht, auf die auch die wissenschaftliche Studie fokussiert, wird sie entweder nirgends finden oder im Ganzen, also in jedem einzelnen Moment – eine wunderbare Stunde lang.
Auf Courvoisiers erst kürzlich veröffentlichtem Duo-Album »Bone Bells« hat man zumeist den Eindruck, als würden ihr Klavier und Mary Halsersons Gitarre zu einem einzigen, neuartigen Instrument verschmelzen. In der Kooperation mit Smith ist die Verbindung von anderer Art. Die Individualität
und Spontaneität der beiden Instrumentalstimmen bleibt jederzeit vollständig erhalten. Smiths pointiertes Trompetenspiel, das heute so kraftvoll-melancholisch glänzt wie vor fünfzig Jahren, und Courvoisiers sublime Virtuosität, die keinen überflüssige Ton zulässt, begegnen einander in Freiheit und wechselseitiger Anziehung. Hier treffen sich zwei Seelenverwandte, die jeden flüchtigen Augenblick zu einem besonderen musikalischen Erlebnis machen. Dass das schön anzuhören ist, versteht sich auch ohne Max-Planck-Studie.

Sylvie Courvoisier & Wadada Leo Smith
Angel Falls
Intakt CD444 (CD, DL)
★★★★ EDITOR'S CHOICE
Sylvie Courvoisier (p) and Wadada Leo Smith (t). Rec. 2024
Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has had significant pianist-duet partners in Amina Claudine Myers, Anthony Davis and Vijay Iyer – and now Swiss legend Sylvie Courvoisier joins that illustrious list.
As two artists who are at a 'later years peak', with each producing excellent work in many settings, Courvoisier and Smith sound entirely assured and receptive as they probe their way through a set that excels for both the breadth of ideas as well as the skill of execution.
On one hand the understatement, or rather strength of subtext, of a piece such as 'Whispering Images' is notable. Courvoisier's opening tremolo is like a ripple under Smith's muted cries, together evoking a vividly outdoor space but the arrival of offbeat string plucking and gravelly chords slant the atmosphere towards something dreamily sub-aquatic.
On the other hand, the variety of tempo and attack on 'Naomi Park', where the eighth and sixteenth motifs splutter and spurt, lends a rousing vigor to stop time traditions, while Courvoisier's independence of left and right hand lines simply adds to the structural whirlwind.
Electronic effects and prepared piano rustlings are deployed with finesse on occasion, bringing imaginary wind chimes into the air, but a single open note from Smith or a stark, densely voiced chord from Courvoisier are enough to bring intense emotion and grand virtuosity into alliance. Captivating music by two modern masters.

SYLVIE COURVOISIER/ WADADA LEO SMITH
ANGEL FALLS
Intakt
In einer gerade veröffentlichten Studie des Max-Planck-Instituts heißt es, musikalische Schönheit werde auf dreierlei Weise erlebt: als ruhige Ergriffenheit, freudige Erregung und gespannte Erwartung. Ob das Phänomen damit angemessen erfasst ist, sei dahingestellt, aber mit dem Ergebnis lässt sich etwas anfangen. Zum Beispiel kann man jetzt mit gutem Gewissen behaupten, bei der Begutachtung von Sylvie Courvoisier und Wadada Leo Smith handele es sich um schöne Musik reinsten Wassers. Die acht Titel sind emotional bewegend, auf stille Weise aufregend, und sie ziehen einen in ihren Bann, wie es eben nur schöne Dinge vermögen.
Das Ergreifende, dabei völlig Unsentimentale dieser im Studio improvisierten komponierten Musik ist nicht auf kurze, herausragende Episoden begrenzt; wer darin nach den berühmten »schönen Stellen« sucht, auf die auch die wissenschaftliche Studie fokussiert, wird sie entweder nirgends finden oder im Ganzen, also in jedem einzelnen Moment – eine wunderbare Stunde lang.
Auf Courvoisiers erst kürzlich veröffentlichtem Duo-Album »Bone Bells« hat man zumeist den Eindruck, als würden ihr Klavier und Mary Halsersons Gitarre zu einem einzigen, neuartigen Instrument verschmelzen. In der Kooperation mit Smith ist die Verbindung von anderer Art. Die Individualität
und Spontaneität der beiden Instrumentalstimmen bleibt jederzeit vollständig erhalten. Smiths pointiertes Trompetenspiel, das heute so kraftvollmelancholisch glänzt wie vor fünfzig Jahren, und Courvoisiers sublime Virtuosität, die keinen überflüssige Ton zulässt, begegnen einander in Freiheit und wechselseitiger Anziehung. Hier treffen sich zwei Seelenverwandte, die jeden flüchtigen Augenblick zu einem besonderen musikalischen Erlebnis machen. Dass das schön anzuhören ist, versteht sich auch ohne Max-Planck-Studie.