Sources Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio

• 1 Près d'Hagondange 06:09
• 2 Dresseur de nuages 08:19
• 3 La Disparition 05:00
• 4 Road to Karaganda 08:43
• 5 A Migrant's Day 04:10
• 6 Sources 05:20
• 7 Quai sud 04:07
• 8 Along the Niger 05:45
• 9 Outside of Maps 03:05
• 10 Sous influences 07:08
• Total Runtime 57:46

Info for Sources

Louis Sclavis’s band of the season is the Atlas Trio, an ensemble with a global reach of reference. Chamber-improvisation, polyrhythmic grooves, minimalistic pulse patterns, enveloping ambience, rhapsodic piano and funky Fender Rhodes, distorted guitar, clarinet soliloquies, contrapuntal themes, free group playing, a bit of everything. An open-form aesthetic applies in multi-facetted music simultaneously exploratory and involving. Recorded in the South of France last September, the album - Louis’s ninth for ECM – features a program of new Sclavis compositions, and is issued in time for tour dates including a major showcase at the Europa Jazz Festival in Le Mans.

In consecutive seasons, French clarinetist Louis Sclavis returns himself to the drawing board. Contemporaries may have long since settled upon a single instrumental style, or a congruent ensemble approach refined over the years, but Sclavis (b. 1953 in Lyon) keeps looking for different angles from which to view improvisation, composition, and musical interaction. In a major interview in France’s Jazz Magazine, looking back over an unorthodox 40-year career, Sclavis allowed that each of his recent ensembles could be considered a “little laboratory”, and perhaps most especially the newest one…

The trio with Gilles Coronado and Benjamin Moussay “features an instrumental formula [with electric guitar, piano, clarinet] previously unexplored by me and it has made me question all my compositional reflexes. I have written things for this project which have brought me into regions in which I have never journeyed and in which I’ve had no certitude about direction. But, wanting to play with these musicians, I had to invent music which might ‘justify’ the association.”

Initial response to that music was puzzlement. “When I presented it to them I saw a huge question mark rising above their heads. Even I was unsure whether we’d be able to play the pieces. Then we got down to work and collectively once again the music took shape. It doesn't resemble anything else, it’s really music conceived for this group and which couldn’t exist until we’d played it. Now I find that the more we play this repertoire live the more we explore the countless pathways it opens up, the more freedom we find despite its formal rules, and the music gains in consistency and coherence. But this wasn’t clear from the outset. It’s one of the most original groups I could have imagined both in terms of orchestration and aesthetically orientation... It is as if the group nourishes itself upon its structural reduction and it is always reaching out for greater concentration and rigor in expression. There is no moment of ‘reprieve’ while we are playing it because you have to be constantly alert... Yet at the same time, because we have found the way of traveling together, it's a formation in which every member has the possibility of finding expressive freedom.”

The Atlas Trio is clearly a group that has found its own language with a global reach of reference. Chamber-improvisation, polyrhythmic grooves, minimalistic pulse patterns, enveloping ambience, rhapsodic piano and funky Fender Rhodes, distorted guitar, clarinet soliloquies, contrapuntal themes, free group playing, and much more. An open-form aesthetic applies in multi-facetted music simultaneously exploratory and involving. Recorded in the South of France last September, the album – Louis’s ninth for ECM – features a program of new Sclavis compositions, plus a concluding piece by Gilles Coronado and is issued in time for tour dates including showcases at the Europa Jazz Festival in Le Mans and Berlin’s Jazz D’Or Festival and dates at Paris’s Sunside-Sunset club.

Louis Sclavis, bass clarinet, clarinet
Gilles Coronado, electric guitar
Benjamin Moussay, piano, Fender rhodes, keyboards

Recorded September 2011
Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Cover Photo: Louis Sclavis
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Benjamin Moussay studied physics before committing himself full-time to music, subsequently studying in Strasbourg and Paris with pianist Hervé Sellin and bassist J-F Jenny-Clarke. He has since played with Dave Liebman, Archie Shepp, Glenn Ferris and many others. He leads his own trio which has recorded for the Laborie label, and plays in duo with singer Claudia Solal.

Gilles Coronado has collaborated with Sclavis previously in the project Signes Exterieurs with saxophonist Matthieu Metzger and choreographer Mathilde Monnier and her dancers. Much of his work has been between the genres. Current projects include membership of Francois Merville’s Quartet, whose album “O mago Hermeto” pays tribute to the music of Hermeto Pascoal, and he is also playing in the quartet Thôt. Previous associations include his own band Urban Mood (1994/2003), Marc Ducret, Bruno Chevillon, Aka Moon, Daunik Lazro, Barre Phillips, Alain Joule, Philippe Deschepper, Benoît Delbecq, Geoffroy De Masure, Steve Argüelles, Thierry Madiot, Steve Coleman, and many others.

Louis Sclavis, born 1953 in Lyon, has brought new impulses to jazz in Europe. He has been an ECM artist since 1991, when “Rouge” was recorded. Subsequent albums for the label are “Acoustic Quartet”, “Les Violences de Rameau”, “L’affrontement des prétendants”, “Dans La Nuit”, “Napoli’s Walls”, “L’imparfait des langues” and “Lost on the Way”. The observations of US critic Gary Giddins, made almost a decade ago in the Village Voice, still hold true: “Louis Sclavis has become an increasingly uncategorizable light in European jazz, devoting as much energy to seamless composition as to extended improvisation, breaking down rhythms so that swing or rock or a kind of static Morse-code repetition are options designed to stimulate specific emotional grounding, and exploring the often neglected legacy of French music; he is staking out his own precinct from which to pursue the jazz muse… …He has yet to repeat himself in the ECM cycle.”

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