With Musiques de Chambres 1992-2012, Jean Derome presents works different to the usual jazz-based releases that we’ve heard over the years. In this context, he presents several works in a more classical style but featuring instrumentation more associated with jazz.

Four of the compositions feature ensembles of four to eight players. Of those, one features eight flutes and another four saxophones. One work features Lori Freedman on solo bass clarinet and another is a duo with Derome on bass flute and alto saxophone along with Lori Freedman on clarinet and bass clarinet.

All of the works feature top-notch arrangements featuring stellar musicianship. While these pieces may not be what you would generally associate with Jean Derome, they should be considered an essential listen if you are a fan of his past work.

Highly unusual performance record of drones, hums and growly toots by Sainct Laurens, a duo of players, in the form of their album Volume 2 (ETRC019) on the Canadian label E-Tron Rec. Montreal players Pierre-Yves Martel and Philippe Lauzier thrive in a marginal sidebar of free improvisation, clearly wanting nothing to do with those energetic sort of players who sweat it up, blart it out, and skitter about with their free-form blurts in manic passion-fuelled bouts. Instead, these two introverts exude a form of rigid control; every note they make seems to be surrendered reluctantly, and at some cost to their own physical comfort. They’ll only make an utterance if the occasion demands it, like two abstemious Quakers at a prayer meeting. They almost seem to be exploring each musical encounter anew, rather than setting out in advance knowing what they will discover.

Second noteworthy element is the unusual choice of instrumentation, which includes a viole de gambe, a bass clarinet, found objects, and amplifier feedback. Only the woodwind half of the act (Lauzier, who also blows an alto and soprano sax) allows this release to be at all recognisable as free improv, and hence gathered in the “jazz” racks at the local record store. There also seems to be something going on with prepared strings, so that one of them (Martel most likely) comes across as a low-key avant-garde miniature Gamelan ensemble, with muffled percussive blows. Their slightly stilted method, combined with their unusual sound, makes the album a winner for me; when they reach the sweet spot of unearthly tone blends, it’s near-delirious. The pair have come our way before on the album La Formule XYZ in 2012, where they did with Martin Tétreault to great effect. From 9th February 2015.

Spending significant amounts of time with the music of Jürg Frey, as i have been doing lately, feels akin to reading a large chunk of the New Testament. There’s very much the sense that one is engaging with not merely the diverse whims of creativity, but multifarious facets of an intricate set of beliefs. It’s often said that composition has more decisions about what not to do than anything else (the same, of course, can be said of religion, with its emphasis on proscription) and in every moment of Frey’s music this is abundantly clear. It’s as clear as it is because in each piece Frey excludes a very great deal, establishing soundworlds within which only a few things can happen. Rhythm, pitch, timbre, articulation, dynamic, development, structure—essentially every aspect of compositional potential is strictly defined and confined, the resultant music playing out within those tight boundaries. In the case of String Quartet No. 3, imminently available on Wandelweiser’s own label, the music unfolds via regularly spaced chords, delivered calmly and flatly, at times dispersing into episodes of overlapping, drawn-out pitches. A triadic sensibility acts like an undercurrent, permeating and conditioning the variety of patterns and behaviours into which the piece settles. Around halfway through, a washed out chorale of sorts briefly emerges, followed immediately by a descending Lydian scale over an F major chord. Not everything has this clarity; the opposite is found in a rather entrancing section later on when all pitch content becomes strained and vague, a process that seems to leave a permanent stain even when normality is restored. The second work on the disc, Unhörbare zeit (‘inaudible time’), delimits the players—the quartet plus two percussionists—still further and is all the more engrossing for it; weak chords and even weaker solitary notes are held (‘dragged’ feels a more appropriate word, considering how they sound), the percussion colouring them with either low rumbles or something akin to a slowly rotating stone lathe. These form the restricted behaviour of the entire 35-minute piece, the only other aspect being periods where to a greater or lesser extent the music is swallowed up in silence. This latter aspect is important to Frey who, with direct reference to the title, refers in his programme note to “working with audible and inaudible durations that appear partly simultaneously and partly consecutively.” Unhörbare zeit is thereby created by juxtaposing these limited sounds and elements, as though they were the only ones that existed in the whole world. New sounds do creep in: granular and wind-like sounds can be heard towards the end, plus — most striking — what appears to be a set of tuning pipes, nicely mingled, but not blended, into some repeating chords (the pipes obtruding due both to their pitch within the triad, an added 6th, and their timbral difference), before the piece closes in a mesmerising kind of microtonally-challenged hocket.

I should mention that should anyone ever ask which five albums I would choose to be stranded with upon a desert island, Jürg Frey’s first volume of string quartets, recorded by Quatuor Bozzini and released on the Wandelweiser label back in 2004 would make the cut. Containing Frey’s first two quartets, written in 1988 and 2000, the music on that disc remains one of a very small handful of Wandelweiser releases I return to repeatedly. The monochrome, minimal beauty of that music has a lasting appeal for me, connecting as it does my personal love for the string quartet form, the almost guiltily hidden romanticism of Frey’s composition and the austere outer curtain that much Wandelweiser music of that period presented us with. This new release then has been, to say the least, much anticipated around here.

There were ten years between the completion of Frey’s second string quartet and his embarkment on the four year period it took him to write his third. In the intervening years the Swiss composer’s prolific output highlights a gradual but evident shift away from the sparse, silence enveloped expanses and muted greys of his earlier work towards a subtly more complex, perhaps more familiarly musical palette. If the analogy of a time-lapse captured pupae opening gradually to reveal its hidden splendour is to be of any use here however it should be noted that Frey’s most recent work is no garishly coloured butterfly, rather the soft colours and quiet fragility of the understated moth perhaps apply as he has stretched his wings to reveal a degree of beautiful subtlety currently unparalleled. The third string quartet, played here again by the Bozzini’s with only one personnel change since that earlier release is perhaps the piece of music that epitomises Frey’s later works perfectly. It is a simply stunning half an hour of music.

Whilst the third string quartet takes in many ways the traditional form of two violins, cello and viola, Frey chooses not to follow the classical approach of splitting the work into four distinct movements, instead following the example of Nono, Lachenmann and others and retaining the piece in one section, lasting thirty-two minutes and taking up the first half of this CD. The third quartet is slow music, as was the second, and much of Frey’s catalogue of work. If the architecture of Jürg Frey’s composition here is built with an acute attention to harmonic layering and the warmth of softly glowing colours shimmering beneath earthy tones then it is through the glacial pace of the music that we as listeners are afforded the chance to take in such details. So as the opening chords, richly formed from carefully chosen dry slithers of gentle tone immaculately in time with one another slide past us they seem to do so with an intense solemnity and a stillness that belies the fact that this could be Frey’s most musical and silence-free work yet. The opening third of the piece is just hauntingly beautiful. The horizontal strokes of the opening gradually give way to a more blurred mass of low register washes which themselves dissolve into a more structured series of bars offering melody sculpted from layered harmonic pitch but still with a sense that it will all just slip out of earshot at any moment. Around the halfway point of the piece a pattern of gradually rising chords begins that form a distinct section within the quartet- lifting the music up from its morose, shadowy, yet highly beautiful opening movements and pouring a soft light into the work that fuels the entwined pitches and allows for the shadow of the breathy near-silences that follow and the more densely coloured swathes of the closing passages.

It is actually really difficult to pin down Jürg Frey’s third string quartet into any simple categories. It serves as the most fully realised recorded example yet of how his music has slowly evolved out of the austere landscape of the early Wandelweiser pigeonhole into something that is literally blossoming, albeit at slow speed, into complex, colourful and yet always incredibly subtle and refined music. Frey’s work has always exuded a strong sense of humility that matches his personality. In his liner notes he explains;

“The music gets its vitality and its radiance, not from gesture and figuration, but in quiet presence — everything is there: colours, sensations, shadows, durations. The music is silent architecture.”

These few words describe the work better than mine ever could. There is indeed everything here, and the quiet and assuming can be peeled back to find an incredible depth of detail and a melodic, even classically romantic warmth presented through music that is quite intoxicatingly beautiful as it hovers close to its own disappearance.

The string quartet is accompanied by a further work, the thirty-five minute Unhörbare Zeit, an older work written between 2004 and 2006 performed by the Bozzini Quartet alongside two percussionists, Lee Ferguson and Christian Smith. Unhörbare Zeit has been reworked for different instrumentation a couple of times, the piece seemingly beginning life as a quartet for flute, clarinet, trombone and cello, probably to be performed by members of the Wandelweiser collective, and then morphing into a double quartet for strings and four trombones before finally the version heard here. Its another lovely work, but this time one that nicely bridges the gap between the silence strewn austerity of earlier works and the fluid beauty of the new string quartet. The piece consists of long soft, deep pitches of varying length that mostly never overlap, though each chord in itself is the result of carefully tuned layered composition. The playing here is quite remarkable. Each of the pulses of sound start and finish so smoothly its as if they were digitally adjusted, and the smoothness of each held tone is such that they sound handcrafted in post-production, but to be clear, they aren’t. Here and there the string tones are met by shorter percussive sounds, but everything is very restrained, controlled, with the silences providing the perfect negative space for the moments of immaculate sound to be placed amongst them. Its a study in controlled pacing, faultlessly perfect musicianship and a wonderfully arranged sense of compositional refinement. Unhörbare Zeit provides a more structured form of beauty, the straight lines of the neat lawns placed alongside the glorious rosebeds of the third string quartet’s lyricism. The quartet is the star of the show here, but the choice of piece to pair with it is a discerning one. Overall this is a wonderful release of music from a composer currently producing music that somehow manages to tick every box at once for me. Rarely is music so gorgeously listenable also so explorative, rarely does music with one eye of music’s traditions sound so thoroughly modern. This is out there on its own.

A duo work of two improvisers. Eguiluz (voice) comes from originally from Mexico. Diamantakiou, playing upright bass, is originates from Marseille (France). They started their collaboration in 2012 in Montreal, where both have their base. Diamantakiou is also member of the ensemble Rubedo’ro, led by Eguiluz. As a duo they take themes from jazz standards as a starting point for their free improvised excursions. For their first release Paso Doble they made recordings in February-March 2014 in the studio, using themes from Mingus, Ellington and Bach. Their improvisations breathe a delicate and fragile atmosphere. They are full of subtle movements and gestures. Beautifully sung by Eguiluz who has a characteristic and recognizable voice. Also the playing by Diamantakiou is fine. A rich and solid work.