By Stef Gijssels
Wadada Leo Smith likes duets with pianists. He's performed and released albums with this format for many decades, and with great success, and with great musicians: Vijay Iyer, Matthew Goodheart, Angelica Sanchez, John Tilbury, Tania Chen, Amina Claudine Meyers.
Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier adds her own touch to Smith's music. Both musicians performed for the first time together in 2017, at a concert organised by John Zorn. Several unissued performances followed, in duos, trios or with two pianos. Of course, Smith is one of the two trumpeters on Courvoisier's brilliant "Chimaera".
Courvoisier's natural feeling of creating mysterious yet gentle sounds match perfectly with Smith's jubilant spiritual tone. On "Whispering Images", she adds an unexpected rhythm with muted piano strings, and a bluesy theme that reminds of "Chimaera". It gives me goose bumps.
Despite the incredible quality of the music and its beauty, it was recorded in one take: “We just played right through exactly the order of the CD, and exactly the amount of music on the CD, with no edits. We probably did that in two hours. And after, we mixed it. The same day we recorded and mixed. We started at noon and at five p.m. it’s finished.” says Courvoisier in the liner notes. It makes the whole process sound cheap and sloppy, yet the exact opposite is true. It says a lot about the skills of the artists, their natural symbiosis and the authenticity of their music: there is no need to change anything if it comes straight out of your very nature, if it flows organically and spontaneous, as it does here.
The title, "Angel Falls" refers to the world's highest waterfall in Venezuela, but it of course also has a double meaning of a falling angel.
Smith has always refused to be boxed into any musical category or genre, and so is Courvoisier: it's classical, free music, expansive and intimate, deeply human but with a level of abstraction that holds the compositions together. Neither Smith nor Courvoisier are iconoclasts or real avant-gardists, preferring a welcoming sonic environment that has deep roots in many musical traditions, yet lifting to a level rarely heard before.
What they present us here, is again among the best things I've heard this year.
Listen and download from Bandcamp.
Below is a video of another duo performance in early 2025 at The Stone.
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