François Couturier and Dominique Pifarély’s musical thread stretches back for just shy of four decades yet their sole album as a duo arrived on ECM Records way back in 1997, with the third stream Poros which was mostly comprised of original compositions plus Mal Waldron’s aching ‘Warm Cantos’ which the pianist introduced alongside Eric Dolphy, Booker Ervin, Joe Benjamin, Charlie Persip and Ron Carter on the cello on his 1962 standout The Quest.
In the years since the pianist and violinist have continued to explore the intersection of jazz and classical music, with Couturier elaborating on his lasting partnerships with the oud innovator Anouar Brahem and the cellist Anja Lechner, who together with Couturier makes up one half of the Tarkovsky Quartet, while Pifarély has bolstered his wide-ranging oeuvre alongside the reedman Louis Sclavis through sessions with Tim Berne and Marc Ducret. They have also continued to collaborate with each other, most notably on the 2008 album Impromptu where they set poems by Paul Celan, André du Bouchet and Jacques Dupin to music with vocals courtesy of the countertenor singer Dominique Visse.
Still the idea with their new album Preludes and Songs was not to recapture old magic but to start something afresh, with Pifarély rooting the process in a practice of consideration and listening, adding ‘we had to really pay attention to each other’s musical personality, since we had built different ideas and forms meanwhile. We absolutely wanted to respect each other’s route, and find a passage to each other’.
On their Preludes and Songs the duo interpret a diverse yet tender and dolorous selection of jazz standards by such artists as Duke Ellington, the bebop trombonist J. J. Johnson, George Gershwin and Manning Sherwin plus ‘La Chanson des vieux amants’ the song of old lovers by the iconic French chanson singer Jacques Brel.
Preludes and Songs opens with ‘Le surcroît I’ which interpolates material from the Impromptu sessions, as does ‘Le surcroît II’, another brief abstraction, and the penultimate track ‘What us’. Yet it is their adaptation of Jacques Brel which really establishes the mood of the album, immediately adding some drama to proceedings as over the cinematic expressionism of Couturier’s trepidatious yet unsparing keys, Pifarély’s violin paints in chiaroscuro whose bold contrasts between light and dark echo the sweeping motions of Brel’s poetry, from the tempestuous storms of its twenty-year relationship to the clear dawn which beckons forth another livelong day.
On the other hand their take on the wartime romance ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ seems to eschew the hopefulness of Eric Maschwitz’s lyrics – with their wafts of magic, trilling birdcalls and light feet like the tap dancing of Fred Astaire – instead finding in Manning Sherwin’s music something of the nightingale’s traditional association as a symbol of lament. The sustained notes of the violin imbue the song with a haunted and gothic character like something out of a Henry James novel, and it is only when their elegant strains are joined by the piano just before the halfway point of the composition that the piece becomes more romantic and heartfelt, as Couturier adds both plaintive appeals and a sumptuousness of tone.
In the final moments his brisk yet somewhat cloaked and furtive keys take over, accompanied by the frayed ends of the violin as the duo embrace the darker shades of Pifarély’s composition ‘Les ombres’. And as that piece stretches into the fourth track we end up with another medley, only creepier still as blackened clusters on the piano develop the atmosphere while Couturier adds a few humming and murmuring vocalisations just beyond the halfway mark. When the violin returns it is through piquant slides that dwell on the precipice of languorous and tremulous, until a furrowing course gives Pifarély enough room to soar open-chested through a break in the ‘Lament’ of J. J. Johnson, a burnished memory with a pastoral air which Miles Davis and Gil Evans treated fondly on Miles Ahead.
After the second iteration of ‘Le surcoît’ another lengthy medley juxtaposes a Pifarély original in ‘Song for Harrison’, which portrays the violinist’s charming cocker spaniel, with Duke Ellington’s steadfast standard ‘Solitude’ as the duo recapitulate some of their earlier gestures before a sawing climax. Another couple of original Pifarély compositions in ‘Vague’ and ‘What us’ carry the same sloshing and spectral if slightly doleful characteristics, making tracks six-thru-eight sound like a suite.
Then Preludes and Songs closes on a high through a stirring rendition of ‘I Loves You, Porgy’ from the opera by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. One of the defining works of American music, as a standalone the song owes much of its popularity to Nina Simone, yet when played instrumentally on the piano in a contemporary jazz setting readily evokes at least to my mind Keith Jarrett and his Solo Tribute: The 100th Performance in Japan with Couturier managing to capture some of that same romantic languorousness and limpid impressionism.
At first though Couturier introduces the theme, playing with an almost truncated aspect before the violin comes in on accompaniment, its long bows gradually wresting control of the melody during the first two minutes of the piece. It is Pifarély then who conjures some of the demureness and wistfulness, some of the anger and dread which serve to define the composition as his violin gradually takes on a folkish, fiddle-like air. The piano dwells inside a romantic idealisation, until the duo overlap once more come the final third of their rendition, with Couturier uttering a few vocalisations on top of the melody, as if urging the piece on towards a successful resolution, before all of those tightly bound feelings and a certain fraught tenuousness dissolve into Pifarély’s tender strings.
