Daunik Lazro - Recent Releases Old and New (1/3)

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 11^th 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.