Daunik Lazro - Recent Releases Old and New (2/3)

Today is the second installment of an overview of French saxophonist Daunik Lazro's recent archival releases. See part one here.

By Paul Acquaro 

Jean-Jacques Avenel - Siegfried Kessler - Daunik Lazro - Ecstatic Jazz (Crypte Des Franciscains Béziers 12 Février 1982) (Fou, 2023) (Recorded 1982)

"In Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe, in the hope that young people would venture to the concert, the name "ecstatic jazz" was often used," explains Lazro in a 2023 interview here. "For example, in February 2000, the day before the trio with Peter Kowald and Annick Nozati, Kowald had invited me for a duet in Torino, where we played under the banner Ecstatic Jazz, in front of an audience of young people in a trance. They seemed to dig our music since they danced to it."

 

Are you skeptical of the last assertion? Well, going to back to this release from Fou Records, it may not be so unimaginable. The recording, an unearthed tape of a show from 1982, after a slow coalescing of sounds, begins exuding rhythmic pulses. Jean Jacques Avenel's bass carries this pulse the furthest with an extended solo passage... one can feel the impulse to move growing. Possessed vocalizations follow, but the bass keeps everything moving along. Then, the track splits. We hear a slightly wavering tone of an electric piano joins the sonic landscape. At first it is just the keyboard and bass, then there is a percussive sound ... maybe a prepared piano? The group locks into a groove and the electric piano gets tangled up with the bass. This continues to solidify into a grooving passage. The conventional gives way to free playing, and Daunik finally enters with a piercing line. He's been missing until now and his injection increases the energy, as his lines coil ever tighter.

 

The next track split, '1c,' introduces a new mood. Pensive piano, restrained bass, the piece grows in volume and pace as a slight streak of modal, spiritual playing creeps in. The audience may have been swaying up to now but here is the first real glimpse of ecstasy. Lazro enters and he is a vector of energy. By the time the hit the mid-point of track 3, they have achieved an enlightenment. Is it ecstatic? totally. Were the kids dancing to it? maybe. It is a fantastic statement of free improvisation, melodic invention, and pure swirling energy, imbued with the energy of say late John Coltrane.

 

The next piece is much different. Kessler is playing electronics and the music is even more contemporary sounding than the first. It begins with an intense blast of electronics, 1982 electronics, but sounding contemporary. This set of tracks is more textured, for example after '2a''s electronics, '2b' offers new musical timbers with Kessler switching things up with the flute, and '2c' finds the trio in a jaggedly interlocking groove, then making some accessible modal jazz. The last track, '2d', is most satisfying, as the group explores the spiritual sound again, the piano holding back as the songs ends to enthusiastic applause.

 

Lazro's partners here, Kessler and Avenel, are two musicians who were integral to his playing and development, as well as the development of free music in France at the time. The recording is archival, it is not the cleanest, clearest of recordings, but as a tape from 1982, it captures the energy perfectly ... something clearer may have actually lost some spirit. 

 

Jean-Jacques Avenel - Daunik Lazro – Duo (Bibliothèque De Massy 16 Novembre 1980) (Fou Records, 2024) (Recorded 1980)

Duo is a previously unreleased recording by Jean-Jacques Avenel and Daunik Lazro, captured to tape during a concert at the Bibliothèque de Massy in 1980. The first track names an imaginary encounter between John Tchicai and Jimmy Lyons in Maghreb, while the second pays tribute to Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton. The duo's music is indeed radical improvisation and stylistic versatility, which, some may say, brought to bear a new legacy of free jazz in France. In the liner notes, Lazro expresses that how this to him is a seminal recording, a document showing that "In 1980, some French musicians had invented their own jazz, freed from its rehtoric and fomalism. Post free, not yet free improv, music was already there, in its splendour."

 

As to the first track, the opening moments reveal the close connection of the two players. Rhythmic and skeletal, Avenel bows an urgent figure and Lazro throws complimentary staccato notes against the taut lines. Tense and melodically confined, Lazro drops out and Avenel continues to erect a rhythmic structure. When Lazro rejoins, he plays more emotively, with a tone that is reminiscent of a more ancient, preening sound. One may detect the 'Mahgreb' in the sounds and rhythms that they two employed, distinctly of abstracted northern African influence. The second track, the one that name checks Lacy and Braxton is as energetic and intense as the first, but seems to invoke more squeals and smears from the sax and frenetic bow strikes from the bass. It feels more concentric and swirling, repetitions and diverging patterns changing suddenly, overlapping and disappearing.

 

The album 'Duo' should be considered an essential piece of free jazz, capturing the intensity and complicity between Avenel and Lazro.

 

Daunik Lazro - Paul Lovens - Annick Nozati - Fred Van Hove – Résumé Of A Century (Fou, 2024) (Recorded 1999)

"Venturing into a record or a performance by Daunik Lazro is not an innocuous experience. You have to fully commit for the duration of the session. It can be intimidating, because you’re sure to tread unto unheard territory. Abandon all cues upon entering. In the end it is all about communion, between the players, and with the audience," so writes David Cristol in his intro to his aforementioned interview with Lazro. These words linger as I try to penetrate the layers of Resume of A Century, another archival recording from Lazro's archives. It is a tough one. The quartet is Lazro on alto and baritone saxes, Paul Lovens on drums and percussion (including saw), Fred Van Hove on piano and accordion and vocalist Annick Nozati. For me, Nozati's intense vocalizations are tough, even as a seasoned listener of experimental music. From the start, the operatic, dramatic and unbelievable dynamic Nozati is an integral piece of the music. Lazro too. He matches the vocals with his own squelching baritone sax as Lovens and Van Hove create a harmonic and percussive structure for the unsettling tones.

 

Stuart Broomer, in his liner notes to the record, provides a perfect encapsulation of the recording when we writes: "What doe the wildly divergent voices of Van Hove, Lovens, Nozati and Lazro have in common? Here, perhaps, everything, for they have constructed a work that poses both and ideal of incongruity and a consistent art that ranges freely, and usually simultaneously between refinement and brutality, elegance and torture, pure song an unadulterated, impassioned screaming." In only the first third of the half-hour long first track, "Facing the Facts," all of these descriptors have been dynamically expressed.

 

While recorded at the very end of the last century, the album feels like a wholly appropriate soundtrack to the current decade. Listen if you dare, and I do dare you.