Jean-Marie Machado & Danzas: Cantos Brujos (RJAL 397045)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Marie Machado piano
Karine Sérafin voice
Cécile Grenier viola
Cécile Grassi viola
Guillaume Martigné cello
Élodie Pasquier clarinets
Jean-Charles Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
François Thuillier tuba
Didier Ithursarry accordion
Zé Luis Nascimento percussion
Recording, mixing, mastering at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded September 7-9 and mixed September 21-23, 2022 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Cantabile and Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne
Release date: February 24, 2023

Pianist Jean-Marie Machado has long dwelled in the fertile borderlands where jazz breathes against classical form and contemporary color stains the page with new light. With his Danzas ensemble, he ventures further into that liminal space on Cantos Brujos, shaping a five-part suite that circles the incandescent heart of Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo. The ballet’s haunted libretto by Gregorio Martínez Sierra, recast here in its French incarnation as L’amour sorcier, becomes less a relic than a living ember. Machado cups it in his hands and blows softly until it flares.

In this reimagining, the Arab-Andalusian and African currents swell like subterranean rivers rising to the surface. Flamenco’s sharper heelwork recedes, not erased but absorbed into a broader choreography of pulse and breath. What once occupied 25 minutes now unfolds across an hour of transformation. The suite becomes a ceremony, an incantation, a circle traced and retraced in ash and salt. Ritual, impressionist haze, and improvisational daring mingle until genre dissolves into atmosphere, a meditation on how memory mutates when sung by new mouths.

The opening gestures are hushed, almost reverent. Piano tones fall like droplets into still water while cello and viola unwind a thread of longing. From this tender aperture emerges “Canción del amor dolido,” a surge of collective breath. Percussion flickers, horns flare, and a soprano saxophone rises in a line so supple it seems to write its own script in the air. The music blooms forth, petal by petal, into “La luna y el misterio” and “En la cueva – La noche,” where shadows acquire texture. Élodie Pasquier’s clarinet in the latter moves with liquid intelligence, slipping between registers as if navigating a dream’s shifting corridors.

Then comes “Danza del terror,” where François Thuillier’s tuba prowls, its voice rich and resonant, joined by a song that feels at once ancient and immediate. Throughout, the ensemble achieves a rare equilibrium. Strength never bruises delicacy. Fragility never forfeits resolve. In “El círculo mágico,” accordion and clarinet entwine like twin serpents guarding an unseen threshold. “Magic love” glints with percussive sparkle and tensile strings, suggesting that enchantment often resides in the smallest vibration.

An atmosphere of mystery pervades the suite, yet it never drifts into abstraction for abstraction’s sake. Even at its most mystical, the music keeps one foot on soil. Many of the pieces are compact, built from cellular motifs that pulse and recombine. The clay drum and flute of “Como llamas” exchange identities with the cajón-driven “Danza ritual del fuego,” carrying us from one temporal plane to another without warning. Just as we settle into the present groove, the ground tilts and we find ourselves elsewhere, suspended between eras. It is here that passion reveals itself most vividly.

Midway through, a solo viola passage opens like a private confession whispered into a cavern. Its timbre holds both bruise and balm. “Canción del fuego fatuo” ignites with sudden joy, a firecracker sparked by a glance that lingers too long. In “Chispas brujas,” Machado converses with cellist Guillaume Martigné in phrases that seem to circle an abyss, daring gravity to claim them. The tension hums. Each note feels like a match struck in darkness.

There is also play. “Danza y canción del juego de amor” struts with buoyant assurance, the full ensemble reveling in its own amplitude. Moods link together like charms on a bracelet, each one catching light from a different angle. Voices rise and recede, tones interlock, and influences weave a tapestry that refuses hierarchy.

All paths lead to “Final – Las campanas del amanecer,” whose orchestral breadth opens the horizon as a diary left unlatched. Dawn arrives with a sound that feels almost architectural, building a world as it erases the last traces of night. The suite closes without sealing itself shut. Instead, it gestures outward, toward a space where the old story has shed its skin and the new one waits, luminous and unclaimed.

When a work rooted in one soil is transplanted and tended by different hands, what grows is neither a replica nor rebellion. It is something in between, something that speaks to the blurriness of identity and the strange fidelity of transformation. Perhaps art’s deepest magic lies there, in its refusal to remain fixed. We listen, thinking we are tracing a lineage, only to realize that lineage is tracing us, inscribing its fire in our own unguarded chambers.

Andy Emler MegaOctet: No Rush! (RJAL 397044)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano, direction
Laurent Blondiau trumpet
Philippe Sellam alto saxophone
Guillaume Orti alto saxophone
Laurent Dehors tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
François Thuillier tuba, saxhorn
François Verly percussion, marimba, tablas
Eric Echampard drums
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Nguyên Lê guitar
Recorded August 30-31, 2021 at La Buissonne Studios by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mixed by Gérard de Haro and Andy Emler at La Buissonne Studios, May 30 to June 1, 2022
Mastering at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne and La Compagnie aime l’air
Release date: February 3, 2023

No Rush! arrives as the ninth testament from Andy Emler’s MegaOctet. Conceived in the suspended air of the pandemic, the suite took shape while Emler immersed himself in the labyrinthine architectures of 20th-century music. Schönberg’s fractures, Lutosławski’s veiled aleatorics, Ligeti’s shimmering densities, the spectral iridescence of Murail, the volatile lyricism of Cavanna, the tensile drama of Manoury and Ohana all seep into the soil here. One imagines the composer alone with these sounds and his thoughts, listening not for comfort but for provocation, as if each score were a sealed letter slipped under the door. Out of that solitude came eight facets of our collective survival instinct.

“Ouv’ la case” opens with an unveiling. The piano enters as a question breathed into a darkened room, chords suspended in air that seems to inhale with them. Wind instruments murmur as though testing the edges of a new climate. Gradually, the piano’s hesitations gather warmth, focusing light the way a lens courts fire from sunlit dust. The ignition that follows is intimate rather than explosive. The title track unfolds in a stepwise melody, tender as a hand feeling along a wall for a switch. Drummer Eric Echampard and bassist Claude Tchamitchian conjure updrafts that carry François Thuillier’s tuba into buoyant arcs, its low brass made improbably aerodynamic. Trumpeter Laurent Blondiau threads bright filaments through the texture while the piano chisels out a groove of crystalline angles. The ensemble moves like a murmuration that has memorized geometry.

Throughout the record, the music returns to a ritual of emergence: spark, ascent, transformation. François Verly’s percussion animates “Think or sink” with a tactile intelligence, marimba tones falling like polished stones into water, each ripple caught by a quicksilver drums-and-bass exchange. “Just a beginning” leans into its brassy musculature, horns flaring with declarative confidence while Nguyên Lê’s guitar sketches streaks of electricity across the sky. Such solos resemble sudden apertures in the architecture, revealing corridors of thought previously concealed.

Despite the mass of sound available to these virtuosic players, restraint is never far from reach. “Fondamental 6” hovers with the poise of a contemporary chamber suite, its textures diaphanous, its gestures measured as if drawn with a calligrapher’s brush. “Three thoughts for two” begins in hushed tones, a private meditation that slowly finds its pulse, marimba guiding the ensemble into a supple drive. When the groove subsides, Laurent Dehors steps forward on tenor, his lines wandering through nocturnal avenues, lamplight glinting off damp cobblestones of harmony. It is a solo that feels lived in, not merely performed. Even the concise “Minicrobe 2” compresses an ecosystem into two minutes, a microscopic drama teeming with mutations of rhythm and color.

“Good timing” closes the cycle with exuberance that borders on the cosmic. Saxophones blaze, rhythms surge with rocketlike insistence, and the band seems to graze the sun’s perimeter without losing its wit. There is virtuosity here, yes, but also a wink, a murmured “mmm” that suggests satisfaction without self-congratulation.

In an era defined by pause and isolation, Emler fashioned music that refuses haste while never standing still. Perhaps that is the quiet thesis of No Rush! Art does not conquer time, nor does it escape it. Instead, it inhabits time so fully that seconds dilate into landscapes. Listening becomes an act of dwelling. One leaves the album wondering whether urgency is a flaw in our perception rather than a fact of existence and whether, by opening our own hidden cases, we might discover that the richest movements occur when we allow them to unfold at their chosen pace.

Bruno Angelini: Nearly nothing, almost everything (RJAL 397043)

| Tyran Grillo

Bruno Angelini piano
Régis Huby violin, tenor violin, electronics
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Edward Perraud drums, percussion
Recorded, mixed, and mastered at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded June 7-9, 2021 and mixed May 2022 by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered at La Buissonne Mastering Studio by Nicolas Baillard
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne label & by Solange
Release date: October 28, 2022

Pianist Bruno Angelini’s Open Land Quartet is aptly named, though the phrase suggests not only geography but grammar. An open land is also an open page, a field upon which signs may be set down, erased, rewritten. The ensemble he shares with violinist Régis Huby, bassist Claude Tchamitchian, and drummer Edward Perraud does not simply spread outward into panoramic space. It inscribes that space with listening. One senses a text to be breathed in, line by line.

For this recording, the band turns toward minimalist poets such as Ada Mondès, William Carlos Williams, Chandak Chattarji, Lydia Vadkerti-Gavornikova, and Jacob Nibénegesabe. Their words become seeds rather than scripts. Angelini does not set poems to music so much as he releases music from them. Each track feels like a margin where ink has thinned and tone has taken over. The allusive and airy qualities of those writers are distilled here into a language that is both tactile and fugitive.

Immersed in the opening “Soul wanderings,” one encounters a poetry prior to utterance. The arco bass moves like a sentence being tested for truth. The piano ripples in aqueous figures that refract rather than declare. Cymbals swell with the patience of an ellipsis. Huby’s bow sings in a register that suggests both lament and invocation. Before a single quoted line can appear, the quartet has already composed an argument in timbre. The music refuses the label of minimalism, though it honors economy. Beneath its lucid surface lies a dense weave, enriched by rubato currents and rhythmic signatures that fold into one another. Different speeds coexist, braided into a living syntax. The result resembles a polyglot conversation in which no voice dominates, yet each retains its accent.

Angelini describes these pieces as rooted in a harmonic language shaped by contemporary practice, sometimes free in pulse, sometimes bound to intricate meters, favoring simultaneity of motion. The quartet merits the term “orchestra” by sheer sensibility of color and architectural ambition. As the third chapter in their journey for La Buissonne, this album deepens the soil of their earlier statements while extending new tendrils into the unknown.

“Peaceful warrior” traverses arid terrain, footsteps echoing through an interior canyon. Notes fall like sparse punctuation, each one weighted with intention. “At dawn” introduces a folk inflection that glows. Its lyricism carries the memory of communal song without succumbing to nostalgia. “Present time” and “Wild wanderings” pivot toward groove, yet their propulsion resists simple forward motion. The rhythm section interlocks with tensile grace, generating momentum that circles back upon itself. Every gesture is examined from multiple angles, as though the band were parsing a complex stanza. Huby’s violin in “Wild wanderings” weaves a dense canopy above the pulse, omnipresent and searching, while the ensemble moves through it like readers tracing a labyrinthine paragraph.

At the album’s core stands “Paterson,” a three-part suite whose title nods to Williams and his epic meditation on place and perception. Here, improvisation becomes a form of reading. The musicians approach the material as one might approach a palimpsest, attentive to what lies beneath the visible surface. Huby’s electronics extend the acoustic frame, introducing a digital aura that neither eclipses nor embellishes but refracts. Enthusiasm forms the suite’s spine, yet its musculature is supple, responsive to each fleeting impulse.

Throughout the album, Angelini operates at a porous border between jazz and contemporary music. He draws from the ethos of jazz, its risk and relational listening, while embracing the structural daring and harmonic ambiguity of modern composition. The quartet inhabits this intersection as if it were a natural habitat. Their music is neither hybrid nor compromise. It is a terrain where swing converses with spectral harmony, where counterpoint brushes against groove, where abstraction courts melody without irony. In this open land, genre becomes a provisional map that dissolves once the journey begins.

And so, when words inspire music that in turn transcends words, what remains of authorship? Perhaps art is less about translation than about transmutation. A poem enters the ear as language and exits as vibration. A melody enters as vibration and exits as memory. Between these states lies a space we cannot fully name. Angelini and his companions dwell there, inviting us to consider that meaning may not reside in what is said or played, but in the attentive signals that gather around it.

Jean-Charles Richard/Marc Copland: L’étoffe des rêves (RJAL 397042)

| Tyran Grillo

Jean-Charles Richard soprano and baritone saxophones
Marc Copland piano
Claudia Solal vocals
Vincent Segal cello
Recorded and mixed in January 2022 by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label and Jean Charles Richard
Release date: June 22, 2022

L’étoffe des rêves (The fabric of dreams) emerged from saxophonist Jean-Charles Richard’s quiet longing to enter into conversation with pianist Marc Copland. From that desire, almost courtly in its patience, the project gathered breath. With the addition of cellist Vincent Segal and vocalist Claudia Solal, the album assumes the shape of a suspended tapestry, light as silk yet weighted with centuries of memory. It is a gathering of hours rather than songs, of climates rather than compositions. Each piece gestures toward Richard’s devotion to literature and to a lineage of sound that includes Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Messiaen, yet never lingers in quotation. Instead, these presences are dissolved and distilled, transformed into timbre and touch, as if books and scores had been steeped in water until only their perfume remained.

“Feodor” begins in the low murmur of pizzicato and baritone saxophone, a dialogue between plucked string and breath that feels almost subterranean. The melody unfurls with a nocturnal radiance, flowering like a vine that blooms while we sleep. There is gravity here, yet it does not weigh upon the listener. It hovers, alert and watchful, as though a character from Dostoevsky had stepped from the page and found himself translated into resonance. The saxophone carries the density of a novel in its tone, its phrases circling moral abysses without falling in.

In “Giverny,” Copland’s piano becomes a garden of harmonics, petals opening beneath Richard’s soprano lines. Their vocabularies interlace without rivalry. The soprano glides in slender arcs while the piano refracts light, offering chords that seem to shimmer at their edges. One hears water, lilies, reflections breaking into abstraction. Richard’s virtuosity is neither exhibition nor display. It is a form of listening, a willingness to be altered by the piano’s spectral hues. The result feels less like improvisation and more like a shared act of painting, color seeping into color until distinctions dissolve.

Solal enters “Ophelia’s death” with a voice that seems spun from dusk. Her phrasing sways between lucidity and surrender, weaving hope with despair in a single filament. The music cradles her words without cushioning their sorrow. The melody drifts through shadows, then briefly catches a shaft of light, as if the river itself has paused to remember the sky. In “Ophélie,” now filtered through Rimbaud, Shakespeare’s heroine is not merely revived but reimagined. Piano and pizzicato cello sparkle around her like broken glass catching sunlight. The setting suggests a chamber opera stripped to its essence, drama reduced to breath, to syllable, to pulse.

“Russian Prince” opens with a soprano solo that arcs across silence in a single unbroken gesture. The piano enters as though it had been waiting in the wings of thought. A motif crystallizes from nothing, coherent from its first utterance, like a child who speaks in complete sentences before learning to walk. The title invites speculation. One might sense the echo of The Idiot, that fragile prince of compassion navigating a brutal world. Whether or not this allusion is intended matters less than the atmosphere it conjures. The music inhabits innocence without naivety, vulnerability without collapse.

Several pieces function as brief, luminous asides. “La lettre d’Isaac Babel” pairs baritone and cello in a duet that feels like correspondence across eras. The lines are spare, intimate, as though written in ink that fades even as it dries. “Light flight,” a solo for pizzicato cello, flickers past like a thought one cannot quite hold. These interludes resemble marginalia in a well-loved book, annotations that reveal as much as the main text.

The spiritual inflection of “O sacrum convivium” introduces an ambient expanse that seems to suspend time itself. Sound stretches thin, nearly transparent, yet remains charged with presence. The spoken word of the title track deepens the sense that we are overhearing rather than consuming. Each piece feels severed from its origin and reborn in vibration. Literature becomes airflow. Painting becomes a chord. Prayer becomes resonance. In this transmutation, the album achieves a rare paradox, steeped in reference while remaining wholly itself.

The closing “Weeping brook” leaves a lone baritone saxophone tracing a solitary line. It does not plead for witness. It simply exists, like water moving over stone in a forest no one has mapped. Listening becomes a private act, almost clandestine. We are less audience than eavesdropper, privy to a conversation between memory and sound.

What remains is not a catalogue of inspirations but the sensation of having stood at a threshold. Words lose their consonants and reappear as breath. Images relinquish their outlines and return as vibration. In that exchange lies a question that extends beyond this album. If stories can be sung and paintings can be heard, perhaps the boundaries we draw between forms are merely habits of perception. Perhaps meaning itself is migratory, moving from page to air to silence, asking only that we follow with attentive hearts.

Emler/Tchamitchian/Echampard: The Useful Report (RJAL 397041)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Emler piano
Claude Tchamitchian double bass
Eric Echampard drums
Recorded and mixed by Gérard de Haro at Studios La Buissonne, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Mastering by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway Grand Piano prepared and tuned by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne Label and La Compagnie aime l’air
Release date: February 11, 2022

Pianist Andy Emler, bassist Claude Tchamitchian, and drummer Erich Echampard have spent more than two decades metabolizing one another’s instincts. What began as chemistry has ripened into something cellular. On this fourth recording, the self-styled “ETE” trio’s interplay feels less like conversation and more like respiration, an exchange of oxygen at the most intimate scale. They have turned toward composition with renewed devotion, shaping motifs that behave like strands of genetic code, spiraling through each piece and replicating in altered forms. The album’s title gestures toward our cultural fixation on surfaces, yet the trio answers with a plunge inward. They seek the mitochondrion rather than the mirror, the quiet engine rather than the polished facade. In doing so, they make a case for music as adenosine triphosphate, as stored light released into motion.

The phrase “polyphonic monologue” used by Raphaëlle Tchamitchian in the album’s liner notes proves uncannily apt. There are no solos in the traditional sense, no heroic cell stepping forward to claim dominion. Instead, the trio behaves as a single entity whose organs hum in cooperative tension. Each instrument pulses with a distinct timbre, yet the borders blur. The piano becomes membrane and marrow, the bass a bloodstream carrying harmonic iron, the drums a lattice of nerves firing in luminous arcs. Their unity is not homogeneity but interdependence. What one initiates, another transforms. What one relinquishes, another absorbs.

“The document” opens like a petri dish held to morning light. The bass stirs first, delicate yet intent, as if sketching the faint outline of a living form. Emler’s piano enters with subterranean warmth, rolling chords that feel like tectonic plates shifting beneath tender growth. Echampard’s cymbals shimmer into being, droplets of metallic rain, while the drums provide a pulse that suggests both heart and forge. The music gathers itself without coercion. It rises as a flame rises, by virtue of its own chemistry. The introduction is not merely dynamic but parthenogenetic.

With “The real,” urgency courses through the ensemble like an electric current seeking ground. The trio advances in braided momentum, their phrases leaning into one another, pressing toward articulation. Meaning here is discovered in the act of motion, finding a curious echo in “The fake,” where simplicity becomes revelation. Tchamitchian’s bass groove stands unadorned, almost austere, and from that clarity the others extract veins of shimmering ore. Piano figures glint as mica under sunlight. Drums trace fine filigree patterns across the muscular frame. The sculpture they erect is vast, yet its strength derives from the plainness of its foundation. Authenticity and artifice entwine, indistinguishable at the molecular level.

Even in pieces that tilt toward improvisational exposure, such as “The lies” and the two-part “Indecisions,” the trio’s commitment to structure remains palpable. Motifs are recurring dreams that are altered slightly with each iteration. Beneath the surface, one senses the flex of sinew and tendon. These are not aimless wanderings. They are the disciplined contractions of a body testing its limits. The music quivers with potential energy, poised between restraint and eruption.

Brief reflections like “The worries” function as synaptic flashes, concise yet charged. Broader statements such as “The resistant” and “The endless hopelude” unfold with a grandeur that invites the listener to nod in recognition. Through it all, the trio breathes as one. There is no arrhythmia, no faltering in the shared pulse. Their cohesion feels inevitable, as if they have tapped into a circulatory system older than themselves. By the time “No return” arrives, the listener has been carried through cycles of exertion and release. Fatigue sets in, yet it is the satisfying kind of muscles well used, of energy fully spent in meaningful labor. The closing passage offers repose, a moment when the organism settles into equilibrium.

What lingers after the final resonance fades is not merely admiration for technical prowess or compositional craft. One is left contemplating the strange fact that life depends on ceaseless transformation. Cells die so others may thrive. Energy dissipates even as it sustains. This trio reminds us that depth is not a static reservoir but a process, a burning at the core that cannot be seen directly yet animates every gesture. Perhaps authenticity lies not in the surface or the hidden interior, but in the flow between them. In that current, we recognize ourselves as both fragile and inexhaustible, flickers of stored sunlight seeking form in the dark.

Bill Carrothers/Vincent Courtois: Firebirds (RJAL 397040)

| Tyran Grillo

Bill Carrothers piano
Vincent Courtois cello
Eric Séva baritone saxophone on tracks 6 and 7
Recording, mixing, and mastering at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded May 21 and mixed June 21, 2021, by Gérard de Haro, assisted by Matteo Fontaine
Steinway grand piano tuned by Alain Massonneau
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard
Produced and directed by Gérard de Haro & RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: November 12, 2021

Firebirds is many things, but above all, an act of faith. Gérard de Haro, long a quiet architect of improbable encounters in his La Buissonne studio, had carried within him the intuition that pianist Bill Carrothers and cellist Vincent Courtois belonged in the same current. Each had left an imprint on the room’s air in separate sessions, as if their sounds were tributaries waiting for confluence. Yet they had never tested the tensile strength of their voices against one another. Courtois has confessed that without de Haro’s conviction, the meeting might have remained hypothetical. Trust became the catalyst. Trust in the ear behind the glass, trust in the unseen geometry of chance. What followed feels less like a collaboration than a tide answering the pull of a distant moon.

Indeed, despite the album’s title, it is water that courses through it by temperament. The frame is Egberto Gismonti’s “Aqua y Vinho,” placed at the threshold and the farewell. The cello begins alone, tracing the melody as though drafting a map across an empty sea. Its lines appear rectilinear at first, crystalline and deliberate, then soften, bending into arcs that suggest eddies and hidden inlets. When the piano joins, it does not so much accompany as set the shoreline in motion. Its chords fall with the measured cadence of footsteps along wet sand, insistent yet patient. Courtois responds with widening spirals of sound, ascending in vaporous abstraction before returning, each time altered, to the melody’s wellspring. The repetition never repeats. It accumulates.

The improvised title track arrived first in the studio, though it appears later in sequence, as if the musicians wished to let it steep before offering it whole. The title track smolders with a folk-inflected sorrow, embers glowing beneath a veil of restraint. Carrothers coaxes from the piano a warmth that suggests hearthlight flickering on stone walls. Courtois answers with phrases that hover between lament and lullaby, a bowed murmur that seems to remember something older than language. Their interplay suggests two elements seeking equilibrium, flame reflected on water, each transfiguring the other’s hue.

Standards such as “Deep Night” and “Isfahan” are treated as living aquifers. “Isfahan” opens into a spacious dusk, the arrival of guest musician Eric Séva’s baritone saxophone deepening the horizon. His tone spreads like ink in water, dark yet translucent, amplifying the nocturnal hush that permeates the record. The trio does not crowd the melody; they breathe around it, allowing space to function as tidepool and threshold. “Deep Night” shimmers with restraint, its contours revealed slowly, as if the musicians were polishing a stone discovered at low tide.

Even Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” undergoes a gentle metamorphosis. Pizzicato cello skips like pebbles across a pond while the piano lays down chords that ripple outward in concentric rings. The familiar refrain acquires a different gravity here, less nostalgic than reflective, as though time were not a wheel but a river whose surface records every passing cloud.

The original compositions widen the estuary. “Colleville-sur-Mer” unfolds in a hush that feels tidal, grief receding and returning with unbidden regularity. “San Andrea” keens with a salt-etched intensity, its phrases cresting in plaintive arcs. “The Icebird” introduces a glacial clarity, tones refracted as if through frozen air, while “1852 mètres plus tard” paints in gradients of altitude and atmosphere, suggesting ascent through thinning light. Throughout, de Haro’s production captures not only the notes but the air between them, that charged interval where sound prepares to become something else.

To speak of transfiguration here is not mere embellishment. The album enacts it. Themes dissolve and reassemble, melodies shift from solid ground to liquid shimmer, textures ignite and cool. Each musician remains unmistakably himself, yet the encounter alters their outlines. The music seems to ask whether identity is ever fixed or always in the process of becoming, shaped by the streams it consents to enter. Perhaps art works similarly, eroding certainty, polishing rough edges, carving new channels in the bedrock of perception. If so, the true transfiguration may occur not within the notes themselves but within the listener, who steps into those same streams and discovers, upon emerging, that the shoreline has shifted.

Vincent Lê Quang: Everlasting (RJAL 397038)

| Tyran Grillo

Vincent Lê Quang saxophones
Bruno Ruder piano
John Quitzke drums
Guido Zorn double bass
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded December 2019 and Mixed February 2020 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Sylvain Charles
Produced by Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne label
Release date: May 21, 2021

Everlasting announces the leader debut of Vincent Lê Quang with a quiet assurance that feels anything but declarative. There is no display of ego here, no virtuosic flourish meant to dazzle. Instead, the album reveals a rarer mastery that effaces itself in service of listening. Lê Quang’s soprano and tenor do not dominate the space so much as inhabit it, breathing alongside pianist Bruno Ruder, drummer John Quitzke, and bassist Guido Zorn in a shared atmosphere where composition and improvisation dissolve into one another. What emerges is a music that seems already ancient, yet continually being born in the present.

This clarity of purpose stems from 12 years of collective life, the quartet bound by a mutual attentiveness that allows each piece to function as a portal to a clearer understanding of the self. Lê Quang speaks of his compositions as keys to a common state, and that metaphor becomes audible across the record. Each track opens a different interior landscape, yet all are connected by a shared commitment to the risk of being fully together in sound. Gérard de Haro’s production deepens this sense of communion, letting the music breathe within the luminous acoustics of Studios La Buissonne, where every resonance carries memory and every silence feels charged with possibility.

The album begins with an environment. In “L’odeur du buis,” piano and drums murmur from beneath the surface while the soprano rises gently into the night air, suspended above an arco bass that glows with lunar patience. Rather than announcing a theme, the piece slowly gathers a climate, a scent of darkness, foliage, and open sky. From this opening terrain, “La fugueuse” moves forward with subtle propulsion, water passing over unseen stones, the band drifting deeper into a current that neither rushes nor rests. These two tracks form a single act of arrival, a descent into the world the album will inhabit.

From there, the music shifts toward flowering and fracture. “Fleur” reveals some of the band’s most delicate interplay, cymbals shimmering with glasslike detail while Zorn’s bass traces a folk-tinged modal path. The group moves as one organism, loose at the edges yet inseparable at the core. This sense of collective breath reaches its most expansive form in “Everlasting,” a ballad built on tremor. Quitzke’s drumming hints at subterranean movement while piano, bass, and reed hold to a semblance of order, a belief that time can be counted. Gradually, that belief unravels. Flow becomes the governing principle of a rising density that never tips into excess, only into gravity.

A quieter inward turn follows. “Novembre” unfolds with the slowness of a season retracting into itself. This introspection deepens in “Une danse pour Wayne,” which refuses dance in favor of drift. Piano and drums speak in a near-telepathic dialogue, light touching darkness and returning transformed. Lê Quang’s soprano hovers above them, trembling with life yet strangely disembodied. Where these pieces search inward, “À rebours” stretches alone, a piano tendon extending between bone and air, longing without consolation.

The album then tilts toward the uncanny. “Dans la boîte à clous tous les clous sont tordus” begins with a solitary soprano that slowly gathers companions, the music assembling itself piece by piece. Tension accumulates, an electric expectancy that never resolves into release, and the listener is left suspended between dread and wonder. That unsettled feeling grows in “Le rêve d’une île,” a land that appears solid only to shift beneath the feet, and in “Rayon violet,” where breath rides atop shimmering harmonics, drawing a luminous arc through darkness.

With “Unaccounted-for pasts,” Lê Quang moves to tenor and opens a deeper register of uncertainty. The sound becomes cavernous, filled with echoes of memory that cannot be named. The album touches collective anxiety without ever becoming rhetorical, transforming fear into a shared vibration that binds the quartet more tightly together.

“Everlast” arrives not as a conclusion but as a threshold. The music hovers at the edge of sleep, brushing the listener with a tenderness that feels neither like a farewell nor a promise, simply a moment of contact. Consciousness thins, time loosens, and the sounds hover between presence and disappearance.

What this music ultimately gives is a space held in common, a quiet breathing room where listening becomes a form of companionship. Everlasting suggests a practice of attention that carries us beyond our habitual divisions of past and present, self and other, motion and stillness. In that quiet recognition lies its lasting power, an invitation to inhabit the space between knowing and listening, where meaning reveals itself on its own time.

Jeremy Lirola: Mock the Borders (RJAL 397036)

| Tyran Grillo

Jeremy Lirola double bass
Denis Guivarc’h alto saxophone
Maxime Sanchez piano, keyboards
Nicolas Larmignat drums
Recording, mixing, and mastering, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France
Recorded and mixed in June 2021 by Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano tuned and prepared by Alain Massonneau
Produced by La Poulie Production & Gérard de Haro and RJAL for La Buissonne Label
Release date: October 8, 2021

On the heels of 2016’s Uptown Desire, Jeremy Lirola steps beyond the grid of New York City and into a wider, less mapped territory, exchanging subway tunnels for constellations. The shift feels less like a change of scenery than a recalibration of conscience. Lirola is listening deeper, sketching a music that resists the gravitational pull of imitation. Building on the spirit of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, he cultivates individuality with the patience of someone tending rare seeds in a storm-blown garden. Creativity here becomes a quiet counterforce to a world that profits from sameness, speed, and surveillance, a reminder that difference can be a form of justice. Joined by alto saxophonist Denis Guivarc’h, pianist Maxime Sanchez, and drummer Nicolas Larmignat, Lirola assembles not just a band but a small republic of attentiveness, each member accountable to the others and to the air they share. Together they construct music that feels open as a plaza yet grounded like a hearth, spacious enough to wander and steady enough to return to.

The album opens with “Mock the Lines,” a room freshly burnished for arrival, its shine inviting reflection without vanity. The track feels both ceremonial and intimate, as though the listener is being asked to shed shoes and preconceptions. From this polished threshold, the group glides into “Living Symbols,” where groove sits in a warm pocket that is physical, spiritual, and conspiratorial all at once. Sanchez’s keyboards spread color like slow daylight across a floor, while Guivarc’h’s alto illuminates hidden corners. The quartet flows naturally into “Danced Border,” a piece that toys with the very idea of boundaries. Sanchez’s pianism ripples with curiosity over a rhythm that knows how to sway without surrendering its footing. The melodic convergence at the end is a sly reminder that lines are made to be questioned, crossed, and occasionally turned into song.

At this point, the record begins to behave like a set of ethical parables told in sound, sometimes laconic, sometimes luxuriant, always purposeful. “Sensitive Border” leads seamlessly into the expansive “Ghost Dance,” where Lirola’s bass takes on the role of a traveling griot with stories tucked into every string. The latter track hovers between what is seen and what is whispered. Keyboards shimmer like memory about to become myth, while alto moves like a shadow figure, keeping careful watch on every phrase. Rather than a detour, this stretch feels like the album’s moral heart, a meditation on how history lingers, how wounds speak, and how music might listen back.

Midway through, the record blooms into a four-part chain of color impressions. “Red” arrives as glittering dawn, full of resolve without aggression. “Black” follows like an echoing supernova, vast, humming, and strangely tender in its immensity. “White” drifts in as a partial eclipse, bright but uncertain, clarity touched by doubt, while “Yellow” closes the sequence in a twinkling dream that refuses to wake too quickly. Taken together, these pieces suggest that resistance to darkness is never one shade but many, a spectrum of feeling that glows differently at every hour.

The album then gathers itself for its final movement. “Essai éternel” arrives like a love letter that slowly turns into a ritual, affection melting into collective motion, devotion disguised as dance. It is both intimate and communal, a groove that feels like care made audible. From there, “Mock the End Lines” eases the listener toward silence with graceful tact, buttering the bread of finality just enough so that the meal feels complete without overfeeding the moment.

What we are left with is not a protest but a gentle reimagining of how the world might sound if kindness were taken seriously. Lirola offers no sermons, only evidence that beauty can nudge brutality aside, that listening can be a form of courage, and that music can rehearse the habits of a more humane future.

Tamio Shiraishi: Sora

| Tyran Grillo

Sky, the sleeve insists. A promise of lift, blue, vapor, and horizon. Yet the sound arrives caked in soil, fingernails packed with loam, lungs full of iron filings. Sora speaks upward only to burrow downward. The heavens here feel subterranean, a firmament made of shale and pressure.

Seven pieces, titled with the Japanese equivalent of “A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” as if language has been stripped to scaffolding and left in a field to rust. Tamio Shiraishi treats the saxophone less as an instrument than excavation device. He does not play notes. He drills, siphons, and fractures. Two dialects coil around each other through the record, twin serpents sharing a single ribcage.

The opening shriek is a filament of sound stretched past mercy. It reads as violence at first contact, yet something in its extremity resembles benediction. A tear across the canvas of listening. One learns more about oneself in the flinch than in the pitch itself. Inside the cavern of ISSUE Project Room, Shiraishi lowers the bell into the dark and hoists up tones so narrow they resemble slivers of light under a locked door. Microintervals shimmer like insects trapped in amber. The saxophone forgets its lineage and becomes a wind tunnel lined with nerves.

These pieces graze the border of audibility. They do not ask to be heard in the usual sense. They haunt the periphery, collecting the chaff of abandoned frequencies, gleaning scraps from farms long since swallowed by dust. Listening turns agricultural. One reaps what the wind has misplaced.

Five subsequent tracks emerge from Thousand Caves in Queens, the studio name alone a premonition of the sonic ores being mined therein. Electronics enter as a brutal accomplice. Reverb collapses into something closer to bone. The altissimo still cuts deep, though now it presses against the ear with intimate insistence, breath fogging the glass between body and speaker. Interventions of wire, distortion, and circuitry feel extra-corporeal, as if the saxophone has grown a second spine made of copper.

There are moments that detonate in miniature, pocket-sized cataclysms recalling the scorched density of Merzbow yet compacted into pellets. They surge without regard for comfort. A geyser with no interest in its spectators. In response, Shiraishi dips into sub-tone murmurs, wind turned inward, a heat that grazes the skin from beneath. Air becomes flame, cheeks raw from its lick.

Even the brief shortest piece carries a gravitational pull, dense as a star imploding in private. It circles itself, a bird trapped inside its own dream of flight, wingbeats echoing until the sky folds and the ground rushes up like an answer.

The final track returns to reverberant space, though not as repetition. More like a figure tracing its outline in ash. A search for origin without nostalgia. The sound follows its own shadow, lengthening, thinning, until walking ceases to be possible. Where it falls dead is where it belongs.

Sora is available from Relative Pitch Records here.