Rare
Sophie Agnel; John Butcher
Victo CD 138 (lesdisquesvicto.bandcamp.com/album/rare)
French pianist Sophie Agnel and British saxophonist John Butcher are among the most distinguished members of the European free improvisation community. Agnel is one of the elite musicians featured on the soundtrack of The Brutalist – winner of the 2025 Academy Award for best original soundtrack (Daniel Blumberg). Butcher is a sonic creator with few peers, exploring for over three decades the specific resonances of his tenor and soprano saxophones, creating compound sounds, sometimes investigating hyper-resonant spaces (a mine, a gasometer, caves). The duo’s music is a model of close listening and multi-dimensional response, their continuously shifting roles expanding the moment’s potential.
Rare documents their first North American performance at the 2024 edition of Festival International Musique Actuel Victoriaville (FIMAV), Canada’s premier festival of “outside” music. Attending the concert was a significant experience, but the detail of the recording adds more sonic subtext and microscopic detailing. From the outset, one Is in an exalted acoustic world. The grand piano can suggest an enormous ukulele or a steel mill; the saxophone’s multiphonic burble passes from woodland birds to a bank of oscillators. Instruments’ interiority becomes our interiority. Then, at any moment, not birds but intense free jazz takes flight.
The longest of the five improvisations, the 18-minute rare ii, is both tour de force and Odyssey, stretching between looming terror and impending revelation, then moving to microscopic details, reveries of air and materiality, wind and touch, memory and futurity.
Rare validates an essential possibility of free improvisation: no matter what you’ve heard, you haven’t heard this.
