Seventeen years on from her first solo album Signs and Epigrams, the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier returns to that singular fray as through determined spells hunched over the bridge of her piano she pays tribute to longtime companions and frisky kindred spirits in addition to some of her chosen instrument’s avant-garde pioneers.
Despite her distinctive sound – at the nexus of chamber jazz from her upbringing in Lausanne and the more groove-oriented downtown scene of New York City which has been her home for a quarter-century – the twelve compositions of To Be Other-Wise play out as a series of vignettes, with Courvoisier incorporating everything from the wobbling strings and gamelan-like percussive elements of the opening track ‘La descente des alpages (for Julian Sartorius)’ as she works through various treatments to the glistening and rippling or more compact clusters of ‘Hotel Esmeralda’ for the comic book artist Hugo Pratt and ‘Scooting’ for one of her musical inspirations in the form of the organist and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen.
Elsewhere the pianist strives to capture the angularity of her contemporary Mary Halvorson and the nimbus clouds and milk pail hands of the great moderniser Henry Cowell, while on ‘Chilling’ she unravels the odd hairball as she conjures the whimsical yarn pawing of her three cats, on a track which still reveals its furious agility and a few sharp claws.
Fibrous plucks disturb the runs and trills of the title piece ‘To Be Other-Wise (for Amy Sillman)’ and ‘Edging Candytuft’ in the manner of Halvorson summons up images of wire-brushed skies ripe with condensation as Courvoisier reckons with the player piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow and soliloquises pensively after her Chimaera ensemble partner Wadada Leo Smith. Meanwhile the twining and crooked ‘Twisting Memories (for Sarah Turin)’ concludes with a hall-of-mirrors chase, before a final ‘Ballade for my Dad’ closes on a tender note even as a few harrowing chords prick the nocturne.
