Tarkovsky Quartet FRANÇOIS COUTURIER Nuit blanche

NUIT BLANCHE

François Couturier / Anja Lechner / Jean-Louis Matinier / Jean-Marc Larché TARKOVSKY QUARTET

TARKOVSKY QUARTET

ANOUAR BRAHEM Le pas du chat noir

These pieces emerged from the keys of a piano. Still affected by the powerful emotion of the encounter, and the exhaustion which followed the recording of Thimar, I set the oud aside for a few months, something that had never happened to me before. It was as though the music came from there, from the space created by that pause. As though it was the very expression of that lack. I did not start out with the intention of writing for the piano. It just replaced the oud. In fact, I used the piano as an instrument of modal writing. I have always had a piano in my studio.

Manfred Eicher, to whom I had played a few initial themes in Carthage, gave me great encouragement to develop them with a view to a recording. I composed some other pieces. Still for solo piano. The piano was the main character, the sole protagonist. It was only  later on that the oud came in. It joined the piano gradually, discreetly at first, then it assumed its place. It was a long time, on the other hand, before the idea of integrating the accordion came into my head, whereas it seems obvious to me now. It’s like this music’s inner song.

In particular I would like to thank François Couturier, my long-standing friend and accomplice, and Jean-Louis Matinier, both of whom worked tirelessly to communicate the universe of this music, in an interpretation extremely alert to nuances and tempos, and to the balance between inner tensions and falls. A tempo passed on to me by the movement of a tree I could see from my window, swaying gently in the breeze. (Anouar Brahem)

François Couturier / Anja Lechner / Jean-Marc Larché / Jean Louis Matinier TARKOVSKY QUARTET

In 2005, French pianist François Couturier organized a quartet with cellist Anja Lechner, accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, and soprano saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché to record Nostalghia: Song for Tarkovsky, released by ECM in 2006, an album that paid tribute to Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), not by playing music used in his films, but instead by creating new compositions, played in a jazz/classical hybrid, that evoked the moods of the filmmaker's works. The group toured as the Tarkovsky Quartet, and the 2011 album Tarkovsky Quartet is a follow-up recording in the same manner; since Couturier's 2009 solo piano CD Un Jour Si Blanc also paid tribute to Tarkovsky, it can be seen as the completion of a trilogy. As with Nostalghia, the quartet also overtly references various classical composers in the music, with the opening track, "A Celui Qui a Vu l'Ange," based on Pergolesi's "Stabat Mater," "Doktor Faustus" on Shostakovitch's "Sonata for Violoncello and Piano, Op. 40," and "Maroussia" and "La Passion Selon Andrei" drawing on Johann Sebastian Bach. The nearly ambient "San Galagno," with its glacially slow presentation of notes; the oddly atonal "Sardor," a collection of squeaks and squawks; and "Le Main et l'Oiseau" ("The Hand and the Bird") are all group improvisations by the four musicians. The actual relation to Tarkovsky is more inferential than specific, as an examination of the titles indicates. Whereas the tracks on Nostalghia often referred to actual Tarkovsky films, those here are more tangential. "Myshkin," for instance, is the name of a character in the fiction of Dostoyevsky about whom Tarkovsky intended to make a movie, but never did; he also wanted to direct a film based on Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, but did not. Leaving aside such associations, the quartet's music can be seen as contemplative, improvisational third-stream jazz very much in the ECM style, even if the cinematic and literary allusions are part of the overall appreciation of it. (William Ruhlmann)

François Couturier / Anja Lechner / Jean-Marc Larché / Jean-Louis Matinier NOSTALGHIA - SONG FOR TARKOVSKY

French pianist François Couturier was inspired by Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) in creating the music on this album, but it should be noted at the outset that the album does not contain any music actually used in Tarkovsky's films in general or his 1983 movie Nostalghia in particular. Rather, Couturier, who states his admiration for Tarkovsky in his brief liner notes, saying that has "seen all his films over and over again," tried to evoke the mood of those films in writing these pieces of music, several of which share titles with them. Typically, Couturier also borrowed from several classical works, acknowledging that "Le Sacrifice" and "L'Éternal Retour" were "inspired by" Bach's Matthäuspassion; that "Nostalghia" and "Andrei" contain "references to" Alfred Schnittke's Sonata No. 1 for Violoncello and Piano; and that "Toliu" has "allusions to" Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. He took this music to three longtime musical compatriots, cellist Anja Lechner, soprano saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché, and accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier. The resulting quartet creates a free jazz/contemporary classical hybrid that will sound familiar to fans of the record label issuing the disc. "Song for Tarkovsky is a project that fits very naturally in ECM's soundworld," states a sentence in the album's press release, and that's certainly true. There are times, notably in the piano work in "Miroir," when one might be listening to an ECM Keith Jarrett album, with its haunting, echoed playing. The music arguably does evoke the style of Tarkovsky's filmmaking, particularly its contemplative tone and extremely long takes. But listeners don't have to be familiar with those movies to respond to it. (William Ruhlmann)

François Couturier / Tarkovsky Quartet NUIT BLANCHE

Following their sublime duo outing, Moderato Cantabile (ECM, 2014), cellist Anja Lechner and François Couturier reunite in the pianist's quartet responsible for two-thirds of a recorded trilogy for ECM Records, all devoted to Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose name would ultimately become synonymous with the group: Tarkovsky Quartet. 

Bookending Couturier's second album of the trilogy, 2010's solo piano session Un jour si blanc, 2006's Nostalghia—Songs for Tarkovsky and 2011's Tarkovsky Quartet established Couturier's quartet—also featuring soprano saxophonist Jean March Larche and accordionist Jean Louis Matinier—as a chamber-like group with increasingly deep chemistry, a particularly profound allegiance to the value of space and significance of decay, and an ability to improvise and/or interpret with equal parts discretion and taste, whether it's vividly lyrical or more jaggedly angular, thoroughly scripted or completely open-ended. 

With Nuit Blanche, Couturier's trilogy becomes a quadrilogy, as his quartet expands its horizons even farther than ever before on an album that explores ambiguous nether-regions of time, space and consciousness. Being from a group that may not record or perform together as often as they (or their fans) might like, there are other projects that keep the internal chemistry growing...and in contexts that, as different as they are, provide grist for alternative explorations when everyone comes together as Tarkovsky Quartet.