The Strad Issue: May 2025

Description: Two jazz masters reunite for an arresting listen

Musicians: Dominique Pifarély (violin) François Couturier (piano)

Works: Music by Brel, Couturier, Ellington, Gershwin, Johnson, Pifarély and Sherwin

Catalogue number: ECM 752 2305

It has been nearly three decades since the last ECM collaboration – 1997’s Poros – from French jazz violinist Dominique Pifarély and jazz pianist François Couturier. But even describing the duo in those terms does them a disservice: both have been immersed in classical music and more contemporary, genre-straddling work alongside jazz, and influences from all those backgrounds are evident in their uncompromising, sometimes gnarly, but ultimately very moving Preludes and Songs.

Its sources are a mix of jazz standards and music by the two men themselves. Couturier’s opening ‘Le surcroît I’, for example, is angular and gnomic enough to sound like Schoenberg or Webern, though it’s played with enormous sensitivity: Pifarély, in particular, offers immensely sensitive contributions, conveying worlds of expression with the tiniest fluctuations in tone or dynamic. His own brooding ‘Vague’ pits gently swaying violin figures against menacing piano harmonies, achieving an almost mechanical intensity by its close.

The duo takes a similarly radical approach to the album’s standards, too. The closing ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ might be the closest the disc comes to more mainstream jazz, but it’s still hard-edged, with forays into less predictable musical territory, and an earthy grittiness to Pifarély’s playing, even when it’s liquid and agile.

Most extreme in many ways is the slow, wailing, double-stopped intro that morphs imperceptibly into an assertive rethink of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, which spotlights Pifarély alone for more than half its length, moving from a Baroque-like austerity to lyrical richness. Their sometimes raw performances are caught in appropriately close and vivid sound.

DAVID KETTLE

from  www.thestrad.com