François Couturier and Dominique Pifarély, defining figures in creative music in France, renew their special connection on Preludes and Songs, an album of sensitive interaction, improvisational flair, and wide ranging artistic reference. Almost three decades have elapsed since the last ECM album by the pianist and violinist (Poros, recorded in 1997), and although there have been shared musical adventures in the interim, this recording amounts to a reassessment and realignment of their duo work: “The idea was not to go back to where we first stopped,” Dominique Pifarély explains, “but to start from the point that each of us had reached during this long pause. Therefore we had to really pay attention to each other’s musical personality, since we had built different ideas and forms meanwhile. We absolutely wanted to respect each other’s route, and find a passage to each other.”
Preludes and Songs, then, brings their story forward, with its programme including compositions by both players and a scattering of pieces that have become jazz standards: Duke Ellington’s “Solitude”, J.J. Johnson’s “Lament”, George Gershwin’s “I Loves You Porgy” and Manning Sherwin’s “A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square” are all transformed and liberated in these interpretations, as is Jacques Brel’s “La chanson des vieux amants”. “We consider this Brel song also as a ‘standard’ - for French-speakers, anyway, and maybe a bit abroad - even if not often played by jazz musicians.” If improvisation is one of the roads by which Pifarély and Couturier have arrived where they are today, everything played by the duo is informed by their feeling for jazz, classical, and new music idioms: they glide between them easily, seamlessly. (And, in passing, one might note that Ellington, Gershwin and J.J. Johnson also declined to be restricted to a single genre…)
The album opens with François Couturier’s “Le surcroȋt”, its title from a collection of poetry by André du Bouchet. François wrote this piece originally for an adventurous project with Pifarély and countertenor singer Dominique Visse, back in 2004. And Pifarély’s “What Us” incorporates and adapts material from a setting - also composed for the same project – of one of Paul Celan’s verses from Lichtduress, a poem that reflects on “Was uns zusammenwarf” (What threw us together).
A poetic sensibility, then, irradiates much of Preludes and Songs, but not all its allusions are literary. “Song for Harrison,” for instance, turns out to be a reflective portrait of François Couturier’s dog, “a charming cocker spaniel.” Here, Harrison eventually disrupts Ellington’s “Solitude”, banishing, perhaps, the Duke’s despair…
Dominique’s “Vague”, with undercurrents and lurching pulse like the swing of the sea, appeared previously in an extended quartet rendition on Tracé provisoire, released by ECM in 2016, and his dark-hued composition “Les ombres” has also been embraced in the Pifarély Quartet’s repertoire. “I like to give several versions of a piece,” he reasons, “rather than to consider that you have to abandon it as soon as it’s engraved.” New perspectives keep opening up, not least in a resonant acoustic space like the historic Reitstadel Neumarkt, renowned as a room for classical music, where the album was recorded and every textural nuance faithfully captured. “We really want to take advantage of the richness of the sounds of our instruments. In concert we usually play without a PA, so we like to have a real sounding space.”
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Poros in 1997 marked a first appearance together on ECM, but the Couturier/Pifarély association goes back much further. They first played together in bass player Didier Levallet’s Swing String System at the beginning of the 1980s. Forty years later, Levallet continues to admire the “subtle alchemy” that animates the interaction of Pifarély and Couturier, and, as he puts it, their “progressive, respectful and sensual” approaches to melody.
After meeting in Levallet’s band, the violinist and pianist regularly played in each other’s groups. By the time of Pifarély’s album Oblique (IDA Records, 1993) it had become clear “that the core of this work was the axis of piano-violin, and so we started to work as a duo”.
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François Couturier’s ECM discography includes the solo piano album Un jour si blanc, three albums with the Tarkovsky Quartet of which he is leader and composer, two duo albums with cellist Anja Lechner (Moderato Cantabile and Lontano), a recording with the cooperative project Il Pergolese (with Maria Pia De Vito, Anja Lechner and Michele Rabbia), and four albums with Anouar Brahem.
Dominique Pifarély’s recordings at ECM include the solo recital Time Before and Time After, and the quartet album Tracé provisoire. He can be heard also as co-leader of the Louis Sclavis-Dominique Pifarély Acoustic Quartet, and the trio Sclavis/Pifarély/Courtois (on Asian Fields Variations), as well as on three further albums with Sclavis.
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Preludes and Songs was recorded at Reitstadel Neumarkt in October 2023, mixed at Bavaria Musikstudios in April 2024, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
