Folio #5
Brulez les meubles
(tourdebras.bandcamp.com/album/folio-5)
Electric bassist Éric Normand is best known for somehow making Rimouski, Quebec a national hotbed of improvised music with his improvising orchestra GGRIL and frequent international guests. Normand has also developed a far gentler (and composed) side with Brûlez les meubles (Burn the furniture), his duo with electric guitarist Louis Beaudoin-de la Sablonnière. Here they are joined by special guests: tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, pianist Marianne Trudel and vibraphonist Jonathan Huard.
There are seven pieces here, with compositions contributed by Normand, Beaudoin-de la Sablonnière and Trudel, but the effect is virtually that of a linked suite, a series of ethereal nocturnes, often with moonlight glittering in Beaudoin-de la Sablonnière’s sustained lyricism, whether subtly lifted or trailed by Normand’s muted bass lines. The ensemble shifts through multiple combinations, sometimes reduced to just the essential duo, at other times in permutations that range to full quintet. The guitarist’s Conscience de tragique is particularly multi-hued, with Laubrock, generally emphasizing her pastoral side here, beginning with a contrasting a capella explosion that dances between Stan Getz-like lyricism and expressionist multiphonic pitch-bending. Trudel’s opening exposition of her La vie commence aujourd’hui is as limpidly graceful as flowers floating on water, her long solo piano exploration gradually opening to ringing electric guitar and gauze-like saxophone.
The concluding Folio is serenely beautiful, its suspended melody passing evocatively among Laubrock, Trudel and Beaudoin-de la Sablonnière in a final performance that’s at once spectral and sublime.
