Mit "Ocre", einer Musik für Drehorgel, Piano, Tuba, Kontrabass und Schlagzeug, schlug die Lausannerin Sylvie Courvoisier noch im alten Millennium fast orkanartig in der Szene ein - das Album hat bis heute weder Kraft noch Aktualität verloren. Statt der Erweiterung ihres Klaviers mit elektronischen Supplements liess sie Pierre Charial in die Pappbänder seiner Drehleier Löcher stanzen, die für Menschen kaum spielbare Tonkombinationen und einen neuen Sound ermöglichten. Sie zog gewissermassen das Organische dem Synthetischen vor - und ist sich dabei bis dato treu geblieben. Dennoch hat sie ihr pianistisches Klangspektrum stetig ausgedehnt. Schon 2006 bei ihrem Solokonzert in Frauenfeld hatten präparierte Saiten und ihre Hände im Flügelinnern die Grenzen der Klaviatur gesprengt.

Konsequent weitet Sylvie Courvoisier mit einfachen Hilfen die Möglichkeiten ihres Instruments aus, um die Musik nach ihren Vorstellungen klingen zu lassen. Unter Einbezug unkonventioneller Töne nicht nur präparierter Saiten, sondern mit Ketten, Schlegeln und Bändern in Kombination mit dem Klavier erzeugter Töne aus blechernem Scheppern, Knarren, Knallen, Klirren, Rasseln, Läuten oder hölzernem Quietschen nimmt uns Sylvie mit auf zwölf kühne Reisen, die sie mit einnehmender Rhythmik, vertrauten Klängen, sinnlicher Reduktion bis hin zur beredten Leere, ungestümer Power und feinster Lyrik entwickelt und daraus eine überraschende Musik voller magischer Momente kreiert. Dabei laufen unterschiedlich traditionelle und absolut neue Klänge in grösster Selbstverständlichkeit ineinander, aus ungewohnten Tönen entsteht ein seltsam vertrautes Faszinosum geradezu magnetischer Wirkung. Ihre zweite Soloplatte ist die authentische Musik einer Künstlerin, die unsere Zeit mit grösster Sensibilität, immensem Können und unendlich scheinender Fantasie zum puren Hörvergnügen werden lässt, ein eindrückliches Beispiel dafür, wie sich Sylvie mit ihrer so eigenwilligen wie einnehmenden Musik erfolgreich seit über einem Vierteljahrhundert in New York behauptet und in unterschiedlichsten musikalischen Konstellationen über die globale Jazzwelt und das Alltägliche hinausleuchtet.

Mit "Ocre", einer Musik für Drehorgel, Piano, Tuba, Kontrabass und Schlagzeug, schlug die Lausannerin Sylvie Courvoisier noch im alten Millennium fast orkanartig in der Szene ein - das Album hat bis heute weder Kraft noch Aktualität verloren. Statt der Erweiterung ihres Klaviers mit elektronischen Supplements liess sie Pierre Charial in die Pappbänder seiner Drehleier Löcher stanzen, die für Menschen kaum spielbare Tonkombinationen und einen neuen Sound ermöglichten. Sie zog gewissermassen das Organi-sche dem Synthetischen vor - und ist sich dabei bis dato treu geblieben. Dennoch hat sie ihr pianistisches Klangspektrum stetig ausgedehnt. Schon 2006 bei ihrem Solokonzert in Frauenfeld hatten präparierte Saiten und ihre Hände im Flügelinnern die Grenzen der Klaviatur gesprengt.

Konsequent weitet Sylvie Courvoisier mit einfachen Hilfen die Möglichkeiten ihres Instruments aus, um die Musik nach ihren Vorstellungen klingen zu lassen. Unter Einbezug unkonventioneller Töne nicht nur präparierter Saiten, sondern mit Ketten, Schlegeln und Bändern in Kombination mit dem Klavier erzeugter Töne aus blechernem Scheppern, Knarren, Knallen, Klirren, Rasseln, Läuten oder hölzernem Quietschen nimmt uns Sylvie mit auf zwölf kühne Reisen, die sie mit einnehmender Rhythmik, vertrauten Klängen, sinnlicher Reduktion bis hin zur beredten Leere, ungestümer Power und feinster Lyrik entwickelt und daraus eine überraschende Musik voller magischer Momente kreiert. Dabei laufen unterschiedlich traditionelle und absolut neue Klänge in grösster Selbstverständlichkeit ineinander, aus ungewohnten Tönen entsteht ein seltsam vertrautes Faszinosum geradezu magnetischer Wirkung. Ihre zweite Soloplatte ist die authentische Musik einer Künstlerin, die unsere Zeit mit grösster Sensibilität, immensem Können und unendlich scheinender Fantasie zum puren Hörvergnügen werden lässt, ein eindrückliches Beispiel dafür, wie sich Sylvie mit ihrer so eigenwilligen wie einnehmenden Musik erfolgreich seit über einem Vierteljahrhundert in New York behauptet und in unterschiedlichsten musikalischen Konstellationen über die globale Jazzwelt und das Alltägliche hinausleuchtet

A dexterous and imaginative exploration of and use of the piano's range of timbres: chamber-avant, solo piano, we get jagged slabs, fingers of concrete, pathos; speed repetition on prepared piano, tinny metal comb hits; urgent marimba-esque woody buzz; pure, lush piano; spare and ineffable; joyful. Courvoisier’s playing is assertive, direct. No blur, all in your face, even the delicacy. A complete master, Courvoisier can play with style, passion and anything she wants. At this point, it’s a matter of design and surprise.

Courvoisier’s previous record on Intakt, Chimaera (2023), with Wadada Leo Smith, Nate Wooley, Drew Gress, Kenny Wollesen, and Christian Fennesz, is magnificent. This solo piano recording (the second of her long career) is a gift of more and continued transcendence, though with a very different feel, or set of feels. Here each tune is a like a private miniature, each dedicated to a different person (and one to her cats). There are exquisite moments, tunes I will return to and add to my forever compilation playlist, delicate, daring, every note and pause vital to the overall effect. Others are more about rigor or patterns, academic even. You may prefer those. I may even prefer them in a few years. What I loved on this round of listening was the inventiveness of the prepared piano interspersed with the unaltered sounds. It deeply humanized the tone, turned the hammered strings into a personal voice, both lyrical and rhythmic.

Is the record title a reference to Levinas’s Otherwise than Being? To already be open to the other’s otherness—a normative standard much in need these days of renewed nativism. It is a fond sentiment undergirding free music, although that’s trickier to pull off on a solo recording.

The opening number is beautiful and mysterious, then broiling rage leveled to a simmering, low piano keys striking mute against determined plucking. Cinematic. The second track (“Hotel Esmeralda (for Hugo Pratt)”) offers an immediate contrast: unadorned piano, spacious, relaxed, a gentle offering, just a little bluesy, contemplative, like the morning after, running into heavy weather. The title track, “To Be Otherwise (for Amy Sillman),” feels studied, a modern composition, Parisian (or Swiss) in America. I don't love this tune, though I quite like certain moves it makes, and I can understand its appeal and its potentially upsetting nature if one were deeply embedded in the classical context. Is it the kind of thing Alex Ross might like? Best title and a highlight on the record goes to “Edging Candytuft” (dedicated to Mary Halvorson), a lovely phrase for patient, oral ****. Though Halvorson’s playing has yet to find a place in my heart, Courvousier’s prepared piano bang-splats and smushed key motifs is intriguing and compelling. “Frisking (for Henry Cowell) is wonderful for similar reasons.

If you are looking for more of Courvoisier’s interplay rather than solo material, beyond her recent, excellent Chimaera, check out, for example, “Obvious Obtuse” on As Soon as Possible (Cam Jazz, 2008), for her rapport with Ellery Eskelin, or on the same record, the interaction with Eskelin and bassist Vincent Courtois on “Mesure d’ailleurs.” Her support of their playing enables them to really spread out, to be gorgeous, fluid, inventive, and confident in the pauses and re-starts. Similarly, on the harder edged, pulsing “Taktlos 3” on her trio record Passagio (Intakt, 2002) with Susie Ibarra and Joëlle Léandre, all three are muscular, direct yet musical and mutually supportive. I admire their collaboration and its mysterious synergies, the delight that is evident in the surprise of what transpires. Courvoisier’s inside-the-piano work is so perfectly evocative against the energy of Ibarra and Léandre.

https://www.freejazzblog.org/2024/12/sylvie-courvousier-to-be-other-wise.html

On her second-ever solo release, Brooklyn-based, Swiss-born pianist Sylvie Courvoisier demonstrates yet again why she is such an enduring fixture on the NYC jazz scene. Though many of the dozen offerings seem spontaneously generated, Courvoisier imparts a sense of poise, logic and high drama to even the most “out-there" sonic explorations. Already one of the most adroit deployers of on-the-fly preparations of her instrument, the studio setting affords Courvoisier the opportunity for yet more complex interventions. As a result, almost every track comes laced with an array of unconventional timbres, from shimmering hum to clanking rumble to marimba-like plonks, giving the whole date a distinctive and at times other-worldly air. But as an unfailingly rhythmic player, the momentum she engenders, however short-lived, means she swerves the dreaded impressionistic tag.

Scripted or extemporized, Courvoisier's approach thrives on contrasting different sonic elements, whether that be the dark stomp from the bass register and furtive tiptoe from the treble of "Preluding (For Conlon Nancarrow)", or juxtaposing the prepared and unprepared keyboard segments of the skittish "Chilling (For My Three Cats)", or pitching abstraction against melody on "To Be Other-Wise (For Amy Sillman)", where the scuttling among dampened keys and distorted reflections resolve into one of her most memorable tunes "Éclats For Ornette". Her predilection for cannibalizing her earlier output also surfaces on "Twisting Memories (For Sarah Turin)", which reimagines parts of “Just Twisted" from her trio on Free Hoops, with explosive spurts and cascading interludes falling midway between barrelhouse and Cecil Taylor.

While there is not usually any obvious link between each piece and its dedicatee, it is not overly fanciful to suggest that the pianist's exclamatory figures and gamelan echoes on "Scooting (For Olivier Messaien)" evoke the birdcall inspirations of the French composer. Even so, there is no doubting the tenderness of the multifaceted "Ballade for My Dad". Here she repurposes the drifting vamp heard on "Le Pavot Rouge" (from the recent Chimaera), cossets it with bluesy phrases and scintillating variations and makes it something else again. It caps an outing which blurs improv, chamber and the jazz tradition into something deliciously personal.

The following selection is our definitive “Best Jazz Albums of 2024” list. The selection is divided into albums featuring solos, duets, trios, quartets, quintets, and larger ensembles, with three selections per category, for a total of 18 albums. We also have one category for “Artist of the Year”, and one for “Archive of the Year”, thereby adding two albums to the final selection, for a grand total of 20 albums that sum up how great 2024 was for jazz.

Foreword

The first months of a new year bring the same feeling of exhaustion in the face of a task that must be endlessly restarted, which seems, towards the end of winter, exhausting, draining, and interminable: selecting, listening, and listing music albums to compare and judge them. It doesn’t make sense.

And then, as the weeks go by, new exceptional albums emerge and revive within us the indescribable experience that only music can create: a more or less balanced mix of all emotions and sensations, a unique blend of vibrations that exists outside of us, but which, strangely, can also resonate within us.

When music touches us, it is as if the notes enter into complete harmony with our brain, our heart, or our belly–ideally all three at once–to possess us entirely. Or rather, to make us one with the music and all the other people who are also touched by this music, incredibly, as if by enchantment: the experience is shared and needs nothing more than a glance to understand that the pleasure is just as intense in that other touched person, like a simplification of human connection.

So, as the year progresses, comes this strange need to list and promote again, as if to shout one’s love from the rooftops. As if to say that something, right here, just a few clicks away from us, or a few steps, is available and that it is magnificent, and that it will dazzle us, move us, amaze us, or bring us countless other feelings.

And it must be shouted, for it is strangely easier to do nothing than to make the effort to listen to new music. Discovering new music requires attention, time, and openness for something that may end up being nothing, like a gamble, whose reward is often uncertain, complex, and sometimes hidden. So yes, it must be shouted, published, and shared, because it is important to motivate.

One can easily live without what one does not know. And obviously, we can live an entire life without ever having listened to A Love Supreme. But all those who have listened to it and adored it should tell you that thanks to it, life is more beautiful, or more complete, simply because this music exists, because the experience of exceptional music contributes to making life exceptional.

There it is. The ambition of this list, beyond promoting exceptional artists, is to share with you what I sincerely hope will contribute to making your life something more beautiful, more grand, more complete, thanks to the unique experience that listening to these exceptional pieces of music offers.

Sylvie Courvoisier
To Be Other​-​Wise
(Intakt Records)

With To Be Other-Wise, Sylvie Courvoisier creates a deeply intimate yet expansive world that provokes and enchants in equal measure. Rooted in her masterful piano work, the album beautifully blends contemporary classical, avant-garde jazz, and raw emotion. Each piece shifts between moments of delicate beauty and stark intensity, with every note and phrase seeming carefully played to evoke the entirety of everything.

Indeed, this profound, intimate release is the perfect choice to open our year-end selection.

https://bestofjazz.org/best-jazz-albums-2024/#more-16878

Suonare da soli non significa essere soli. Abituata a suonare dal vivo in beata autarchia in giro per il mondo da molto tempo, più o meno da altrettanto la pianista svizzera da anni residente a New York non andava in studio per registrare in dorata solitudine, precisamente dal 2007 ("Signs And Epigrams"). In questo ottimo lavoro dedica tracce a Hugo Pratt, alla partner in crime Mary Halvorson, Wadada Leo Smith, Conlon Nancarrow, Olivier Messiaen, Ned Rothenberg, Henry Cowell, prepara il pianoforte e ne estrae suoni come una speleologa in grotta. Una parata di nomi che ben dimostra gli ampi, mutevoli orizzonti verso cui tende lo sguardo dell'autrice: sghembe brume monkiane da cui emergono profili avant, decostruzioni e visioni, tocco, eleganza, rigore, lirismo, delicatissima follia

SYLVIE COURVOISIER, eine kreative Konstante in Sachen Pianistik auf Intakt, präsentiert mit To Be Other-Wise (Intakt CD 429) ihr erst zweites Soloalbum. Vertraut ist sie im Duo oder Quartet mit Mark Feldman, mit Léandre, Ibarra, Anker und Mori als Femmes unter sich, im Trio mit Drew Gress & Kenny Wollesen, das sie als Chimaera verdoppelte mit Fennesz und den Trompeten von Wooley und Wadada Leo Smith.

Die umtriebige Schweizer Pianistin Sylvie Courvoisier veröffentlicht mit "Other Wise" ihr zweites Soloalbum.

https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/ard-jazz-spotlight/other-wise-sylvie-courvoisier-solo/ard/13815059/

Recently the Swiss improviser Sylvie Courvoisier was paid tribute to among others on the wonderful new Kris Davis trio album Run the Gauntlet

And this is its equal.

Just as adventurous Courvoisier isn’t afraid to go out far into the deeper waters of abstraction.

And yet there is a huge discipline, massive detail in the miniatures that emboss themselves on to your consciousness as you listen and a rippling energy to what’s here.

If you like the English pianist Julie Sassoon who lives in Germany and may even like Davis have been influenced by Courvoisier along the way then certainly the style here fits right in with such an approach. Also there is some commonality in approach with Marilyn Crispell.

Dedicatees include Wadada Leo Smith
Recorded in a Südwestrundfunk studio in Freiburg this year there are a lot of dedicatees paid homage to from Messiaen and Nancarrow to Mary Halvorson and the great trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith who is himself in the video above in a performance filmed last year with Courvoisier in the pianist’s group Chimaera.

And Courvoisier’s father is also a dedicatee making even more of a personal and familial connection in the roll call.

‘Ballade for My Dad’ is actually the longest piece of all.

Pieces are quite succinct but there is a great intensity to what the pianist manages to get across no matter what length they are measured by.

And on a track such as ‘Twisting Memories’ massive power is exerted too. That strength of purpose and clear sighted assault on the keys is impressive in terms of the gravity of expression. The sonics are very cleanly captured in the sound recording.

Courvoisier who was born in Lausanne 55 years ago has been making albums under her own name since the 1990s.

Music journalist Julia Neupert, in the sleeve notes, mentions that when the Steinway in the studio went out of tune due to the high humidity in the room and that the pianist adding prepared piano elements ”took out a colourful cloth bag from her pocket, filled to the brim with small bits of wood that she had hand-carved some time ago for the recording of a film score.”

Seek out Signs and Epigrams as a reasonable point of reference from her previous work and album that was issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2007 and definitely listen to both alongside the new Kris Davis for a bit of worthwhile time travelling that the digital age is so good at enabling.

https://marlbank.net/2024/10/22/sylvie-courvoisier-to-be-other-wise-intakt/

SYLVIE COURVOISIER, eine kreative Konstante in Sachen Pianistik auf Intakt, präsentiert mit To Be Other-Wise (Intakt CD 429) ihr erst zweites Soloalbum. Vertraut ist sie im Duo oder Quartet mit Mark Feldman, mit Léandre, Ibarra, Anker und Mori als Femmes unter sich, im Trio mit Drew Gress & Kenny Wollesen, das sie als Chimaera verdoppelte mit Fennesz und den Trompeten von Wooley und Wadada Leo Smith. Dem hat sie hier 'Soliloquizing' gewidmet, und auch alle andern Kompositionen haben einen Adressaten: 'La descente des alpages' (for Julian Sartorius), 'Hotel Esmeralda' (for Hugo Pratt – nicht nur wegen Corto Maltese, Pratt war ein persönlicher Freund), beim Titelstück Amy Sillman (bis 2020 Professorin für Malerei an der Städelschule in Frankfurt), 'Preluding' (for Conlon Nancarrow), 'Scooting' (for Oliver Messiaen), 'Twirling' (for Ned Rothenberg), 'Edging Candytuft' (for Mary Halvorson), 'Frisking' (for Henry Cowell), dazu 'Twisting Memories' (for Sarah Turin - eine Reiki-Therapeutin), 'Chilling' (for my three cats) und 'Ballade for my Dad'. Ganz für sich, spielen die über die Tasten hinausgreifenden Möglichkeiten des Pianos eine besonders große Rolle. So dass das Selbstporträthafte des Monologs durch die Klangfülle orchestriert und durch die Widmungen sogar vielpolig vernetzt wird. Mit tönerner Präparation, krabbeliger Motorik, metallischen Akzenten, perligem Klirren, melancholisch und dissonant, dramatisch, verträumt, rasant, vogelig, klapprig, sprungfedrig, als Feuerkopf, abgründig, ostinat. Und mit ganz viel Dankbarkeit und Liebe.