Sylvie Courvoisier Chimaera

SYLVIE COURVOISIER piano
WADADA LEO SMITH trumpet
NATE WOOLEY trumpet
CHRISTIAN FENNESZ electronics
DREW GRESS bass
KENNY WOLLESEN drums
NASHEET WAITS drums

‘CHIMAERA' is Sylvie Courvoisier’s new ensemble. The compositions for this band, originally commissioned and premiered as a quintet at the Sons d’Hiver Festival in Paris on feb 17th 2022, are inspired by the work of the painter Odilon Redon; a universe of symbolism, dreams and fantasy.

For this performance at Roulette, Sylvie is rewriting part of these compostions and adding another trumpet part for Wadada Leo Smith.

The core of this new sextet is her trio (created in 2013) with Drew Gress on double bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums. For some of these pieces, Kenny is adding his magic touch on the vibraphone.

Wadada Leo Smith has the role of the “Sage”; underlining some phrases of the compositions as an experienced maestro of power and restraint. He will be also heard in some choice moments for moment of silence. Nate Wooley’s role is to stay closer to the compostions and use his craft of his extended technique.

Christian Fennesz, wizard of electronic music, has the mission of transforming the atmosphere, creating ambient and meditative sounds. He functions as an acrobat, creating tension to provide a fragile instability and balance for the group.

EURO TOUR — SUMMER 2024

Prolific pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier’s newest ensemble — the atmospheric, shape-shifting Chimaera — will be touring across Europe from July to September 2024, performing music from Courvoisier’s double-disc Chimaera album, to be released in November 2023 via the Swiss label Intakt. The virtuoso touring group features Christian Fennesz on electric guitar/effects, Nate Wooley on trumpet and Drew Gress on double-bass alongside a pair of percussionists: Nasheet Waits on drums and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibraphone. The Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based Courvoisier — whom The New York Times described as “a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise” — has played notably in the Big Apple and beyond with Wooley and Waits, while Gress and Wollesen are longtime members of her ever-excellent trio, praised on both sides of the Atlantic. Chimaera’s wildcard is Fennesz, the Austrian artist known for his ambient-textured work both solo and in league with such figures as Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian, as well as with the ECM-affiliated band Food. Spacious and shimmering, Chimaera presents a reverie of sound unlike any the prize-winning Courvoisier has crafted before.

For the music of Chimaera — initially commissioned by the Sons d’hiver festival in Paris — Courvoisier was inspired by the Symbolist paintings of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a French artist whose fantastical, hallucinatory work aimed to place “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” Redon’s otherworldly images marked him as a precursor to the Surrealists; moreover, he likened these enigmatic pictures to music, in that they evoked “the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” The lucid-dream sounds of Courvoisier’s Chimaera album stay true to this impulse, floating and elusive like shadows on the ocean; on tour, the pianist’s sextet will make her compositions come alive in the moment, expansive and subtly different from night to night — the melodic glint of trumpet, piano and vibraphone atop a rolling groove of rhythmic ambience, with Fennesz’s magic clouds of guitar enveloping the band.

Such is the beguiling quality of Chimaera that it could turn out to be Courvoisier’s most celebrated project to date. But she has been going from strength to strength for years, crossing borders with a creative spirit and a free mind. Courvoisier earned her renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the richly detailed depth of her European chamber-music roots and the hard-grooving, hook-laden sounds of the downtown New York jazz scene. She has interpreted music from Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps to John Zorn’s Bagatelles, revealing new possibilities. Her two-decade partnership with violinist Mark Feldman yielded a seemingly telepathic duo, as well as an acclaimed quartet; she has also pursued ear-opening collaborations with such avant-jazz luminaries as Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Ellery Eskelin, Susie Ibarra, Fred Frith and Mary Halvorson. As NPR’s Kevin Whitehead has said: “Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral… Sylvie Courvoisier treats it like a playground.”

— Bradley Bambarger

In case you want to be get STUNNED by a female MASTERPIECE in dark days, listen to this MUSIC coming from a deeper place in space. It is music that necessarily had to be created, had to come into existence and will enrichus immensely. Let yourself pull into its swathe of sound and let you carry by its reverbs, the echoes of our souls. it’s music you have not heard before but it comes as something known to your deeper soul.Strange enough the sounds of the opener “The Red Poppy” immediately triggered associations with the opener of Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew”, and, after a while also associations with Jon Hassell or David Torn. I can better use the German word “Anklänge” here meaning that sounds of Davis, Hassell and Torn were co-sounding now and then in my mind. Courvoisier’s waves and runs arehowever lighter, scurrying, more elusive, more mystic, playing with contrasts of dark and light, the mechanical and flowing, of gliding shadows and wild runs and bursts. The ambient turns into surreal regularly, even getting nightmarish once in a while. 

There are eminent musical forces next to Courvoisier bringing this magical sound-light-mood fluctuation into our listening reality: Christian Fennesz’ electric guitar washes and Kenny Wollesen’s greatly timed vibraphone gushing. Composition and performance are two poles of an amazing continuum that manifests and merges in our ears, mind and soul. One of Courvoisier’s sources of inspiration, the works of visual artist Odilon Redon (1840-1916) , a contemporary of Claude Debussy (1862-1918), made it all more strong, bold and brilliant: as he said “… my drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realness of the un-determined.” (Odilon Redon) This extraordinary music work emerging from a long course of musical exploring development has been released as double album of twice 43 minutes running time. It no doubt deserves a decent vinyl edition!

Henning Bolte

One way and another, Sylvie Courvoiser’s new album, Chimaera, contains the most sheerly beautiful music I’ve heard this year. Inspired by the paintings and drawings of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), these pieces recall the words of the French artist about his own work: “They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” Without getting remotely literal about it, Courvoisier finds ways of creating a music parallel to such works as “Partout des prunelles flamboient (Everywhere eyeballs are ablaze)” and “Le pavout rouge (The red poppy)”, summoning dream-like textures that swirl and mingle, float and evaporate, creating pictures of their own.

Richard Williams - October 31, 2023