A little while ago, Free Jazz Blog contributor David Cristol interviewed
French saxophonist Daunik Lazro (here)- shedding a bit of light on a seminal figure in the development of
French free improvisation. Over the past few years, Lazro has been actively filling in the gaps of his already impressive discography with archival recordings on mainly (but not limited to) Fou
Records. Over the next several days Stuart Broomer, Paul Acquaro and Stef
Gijssels will explore many of these recordings.
By Stuart Broomer
Annick Nozati, Daunik Lazro – Sept Fables Sur L’Invisible (Mazeto Square,
2024) (Recorded 1994)
This duet was recorded at the 11th edition of Festival Musique
Action in May 1994. Nozati is credited with voice and texts, Lazro with alto
and baritone saxophones. It is work of the rarest quality, testament of
empathy, dreamscape, collaboration of great technical resource. Novati, among
the most expressive of improvising vocalists, can also be among the most
restrained, reducing her sound to the purest expression, whether executing
wide intervals or tracing the subtlest gradations of pitch. These spontaneous
songs often stretch tones beyond anything recognizable as verbal. Voice and
saxophone proceed with an intimate entwining of lines. The two first tracks
are the longest, each developed brilliantly. With
“A’loré” we are immediately immersed in an unknown
world, Nozati’s voice is a somber, slightly gravelly, invocation,
Lazro’s alto possesses a lightness approaching the timbre of a flute;
eventually Nozati’s voice will grow in intensity, but an intensity that
is tightly controlled, while Lazro’s sound becomes wholly saxophone,
sweetly abrasive, subtly multiphonic, fluttering from register to register,
the whole a triumph of emotional depth. “Alterné”, the
following track, continues the profundity in very different ways, beginning
with a solo baritone saxophone that Nozati eventually joins in a duo of
breathtaking exactitude of pitch, the two “voices” mirroring and
complementing one another. Those qualities are developed throughout.
Daunik Lazro/ Carlos Alves “Zingaro”/ Joëlle Léandre/ Paul Lovens
– Madly You (Fou, 2024) (Recorded 2001)
Madly You, initially released on Potlatch in 2002, was recorded at
the Banlieues Bleues Festival in 2001 and places Lazro squarely and fittingly
in a quartet of master improvisers and contemporaries – bassist (and
vocalist) Joëlle Léandre, violinist
Carlos “Zingaro”, drummerPaul Lovens – all marked by an ability, and willingness, to find a
unique collective vision, exercising rare, collective genius. Within the
first minute of the opening “Madly You”, the four have begun to
construct an original space in an interweave of bowed string harmonics from
Léandre and “Zingaro”, distinguishable primarily by
register and resonance, a duet that continues for an extended period with
Lovens’ tidily minimalist, Asiatic abstraction and punctuation of taut
drum and shimmering metal, eventually leading to a triumphal veil too
translucent to be called a drum solo. Lazro’s entry on baritone
straddles a large mammal’s eerie pain and a bank of oscillators, soon
calling up a sympathetic whistling of arco strings. Everything is in flux,
including the baritone’s high-speed flight in barely accented lines,
then the shifting dialogue is sustained without longueurs to slightly over
forty minutes, including whispering baritone saxophone (remarkably, Lazaro
can play violently and dizzyingly quietly), pizzicato bass, violin and
drums, the whole sometimes devoted to a collective skittering in which
delineations of identity are under scrutiny. There’s also a march. The
following “Lyou Mad”, at about half the length, sustains the
quality, with Lazro’s baritone foregrounded and Léandre and
“Zingaro” creating squall as well as chamber textures.
Sophie Agnel/ “Kristoff K. Roll”/ Daunik Lazro – Quartet un peu
Tendre (Fou Records, 2024) (Recorded 2020/21)
Collective genius is invariably social. Here that dimension is insistent.
Quartet un peu tendre (the title is ironic) matches Lazro’s
baritone with Sophie Agnel’s piano and the electronic devices of
“Kristoff K. Roll”, the duo
Of J-Kristoff Camps and Carole Rieussec. There are two extended pieces:
“au départ c’est une photo”
(“At the Beginning It’s a Photo”) and “l’hiver sera
chaud” (“winter will be warm), 31 and 41 minutes respectively.
It’s collective improvisation, but the collection of sound sources
employed by the Kristoff K. Roll duo take it to other dimensions, from found
sound and musique concrète, extended sound samples of a speech, a
pitch-distorted children’s choir and various synthesized elements. The
cumulative effect may some feel opposite to the intense “live”
improvisation of Sept Fables or Madly You. That immediate
sense of place and time is here displaced by a compound experience, the
instrumental resources of Lazro and Agnel drawn into a kind of compound
nowhere, a theatre without walls in which the lost, found and immediate mingle
together, elsewhere and nowhere with now, then and maybe in a compound
experience of never and somewhere.
There’s a beautiful moment of temporality, almost a lullaby amidst
“au départ c’est…” (that time frame might be
ironic, the warm winter, too) in which Lazro plays the sweetest of reveries
accompanied by only Agnel’s lightly articulated, damped intervals. When
other elements enter, quiet and abstracted, they do not disrupt the effect but
nonetheless strangely compound the time, eventually situating the duo in a
kind of unidentifiable field, industrial, intimate, unknowable.
“L’hiver sera chaud” will take this even further, beginning
with an animated crowd scene that includes both a central orator and shouting
children, suggesting a post-colonial third world –a documentary that
partners with the passionate or profoundly considered improvisations to create
a compound time of inter-related realities and responsibilities. Dogmatic?
Hardly. Subtleties abound: a piano plays in a dry acoustic; simultaneous
random percussion is alive with resonant overtones. Lazar’s baritone
wanders through an industrial forcefield and a windfarm. I want my best of
’24 lists back for revision. This “tender quartet”, this
multiverse of living tissue, insists.