Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio - Sources (2012) [Official Digital Download 24/88]

Clarinetist Louis Sclavis leads his Atlas Trio on this eclectic collection of songs encompassing chamber improvisation, polyrhythmic grooves, minimalistic pulse patterns, enveloping ambience, rhapsodic piano and funky Fender Rhodes from Benjamin Moussay, distorted guitar, clarinet soliloquies, contrapuntal themes and free group playing: really a bit of everything. An open form aesthetic applies in this multifaceted music, simultaneously exploratory and involving. The album contains all-original Sclavis compositions except for the final number, contributed by the trio's electric guitarist Gilles Coronado.

The uncategorisable French clarinettist Louis Sclavis has been one of Europe's most creative contemporary musicians since the 1980s, and as an ECM Records artist since 1991, he has unflinchingly avoided repetition from album to album. The Atlas trio thus features a lineup of clarinets, electric guitar (Gilles Coronado) and acoustic and electric pianos (Benjamin Moussay) he has never used before, with an all-new repertoire to match. Sclavis's affection for north African music is still clear in some of these stately collective dances and lament-like unison themes, but the trio sound is transformed by guitarist Coronado's biting solos and edgy metallic chordwork, and Moussay's mix of ensemble precision and free-jazz impetuousness. The ebb-and-flow pattern of steadily accumulating and receding unison motifs gets familiar, but themes like the staccato, darting Près d'Hagondange with its stormy guitar undercurrents, the vivaciously stamping Migration, or the interlocking, ensemble-devoted conversation of Along the Niger confirm how freely Sclavis's imagination still runs. It's sometimes postboppish, sometimes folksy, sometimes abstractly funky – and the closing Sous Influences, with its choppy guitar parts and Fender Rhodes keys, even sounds like an elegant French bow to Bitches Brew.

Tracklist:

01 - Près d'hagondange
02 - Dresseur de nuages
03 - La disparition
04 - A Road To Karaganda
05 - Sources
06 - Migration
07 - Quai sud
08 - Along The Niger
09 - Outside Of Maps
10 - Sous influences

Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher. Engineered by Gérard de Haro.
Recorded in September 2011 at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France.

Musicians:
Louis Sclavis - bass clarinet, clarinet
Benjamin Moussay - piano, Fender Rhodes, keyboards
Gilles Coronado - electric guitar


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