Constellative Trio

Constellative Trio

CD
Jun 2024

A blessed chemistry binds these sonic souls, so open to intersections and creative collisions, so faithful in declining the resulting poetic breath.
A generative process animated by a deep adherence, dynamic tension, timbral awareness and a fervor that runs through the breath of this music.
The color of this trio's sound is constellative, rippled by broad narrative flashes and rich in an expressive and sincere palette. A path to an ineffable form, a limpid communicative example in opaque times.

Tracklist

Blossom song
Green Bagatelle
Let the shadow come in
Purple bagatelle
The laziest mankind
Crinale Tale Of the Shuffled Sheets
Qualities of an afternoon
Blue bagatelle
Scattered Newspaper
Orange bagatelle

Credits

Gianni Mimmo : saxophone soprano
Gaël Mevel : violoncelle
Thierry Waziniak : batterie

Trybuna Muzyki Spontanicznej

Constellative Trio, to bodaj najłagodniejsza propozycja w dzisiejszym zestawie – włosko-francuska, kameralna, delikatna w brzmieniu, chwilami bardzo melodyjna, choć w rzewny, dalece melancholijny sposób. Nie oznacza to jednak, iż nagranie pozbawiane jest emocji typowych dla muzyki swobodnie improwizowanej. Wręcz przeciwnie! 
Opowieść na sopran, małą wiolonczelę i perkusję składa się z siedmiu rozbudowanych improwizacji oraz czterech miniatur (na ogół krótszych niż minuta), które sprawiają się wrażenie delikatnie zaaranżowanych. Improwizacje bazują często na post-barokowej figurze granej arco, smutnym, wystudzonym saksofonie i nerwowej perkusji, która raz po raz kruszy kameralne odium opowieści. Gdy Mevel przechodzi w tryb pizzicato narracja momentalnie nabiera post-jazzowej krwistości i intrygująco zagęszcza ścieg. Tak dzieje się choćby w trzeciej i piątej odsłonie. W szóstej sopran urokliwie preparuje i sieje rezonujące obłoki. Z kolei opowieści numer siedem i osiem to perełki w zestawie. Konsumują one wszelkie walory albumu – z jednej strony niesione są melodyką dęciaka i strunowca, która smakuje muzyka dawną, estetyką niemalże żałobną, z drugiej kryją w sobie nerw jazzu, wreszcie na etapie rozwinięcia pokazują nowe, jeszcze piękniejsze oblicze tria – mroczne, wystudzone, pełne podskórnych emocji. Dziesiąta improwizacja zaczyna się wyjątkowo leniwie, wręcz przynudza, ale później, bogacona soczystymi frazami każdego z artystów, zdaje się pretendować do miana jedno z najlepszych momentów albumu. 

 
Constellative Trio, is perhaps the gentlest offering in today's set - Italian-French, intimate, delicate in sound, at times very melodic, albeit in a languid, far from melancholic way. This does not mean, however, that the recording is deprived of the emotions typical of freely improvised music. Quite the contrary!
The Tale for soprano, small cello and percussion consists of seven extended improvisations and four miniatures (generally less than a minute long), which appear to be delicately arranged. The improvisations are often based on a post-Baroque figure played arco, a sad, cooled saxophone and edgy percussion that time and again crushes the intimate odium of the story. When Mevel switches into pizzicato mode the narrative momentarily takes on a post-jazz bloodiness and intriguingly thickens the stitch. This is the case even in the third and fifth movements. In the sixth, the soprano charmingly prepares and sows resonating clouds. Stories number seven and eight, on the other hand, are the gems of the set. They consume all the qualities of the album - on the one hand, they carry the melodics of the wind and string player with a flavour of early music, an almost mournful aesthetic, on the other, they hide the nerve of jazz, and finally, at the development stage, they show a new, even more beautiful face of the trio - dark, cooled, full of undercurrents of emotion. The tenth improvisation starts off exceptionally languid and even dull, but then, enriched by the juicy phrases of each of the artists, it seems to pretend to be one of the best of the trio.
Percorsi Musicali
Danile Barbiero

The Constellative Trio is the improvising trio of French musicians Gaël Mevel and Thierry Waziniak, along with the Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo. Although this self-titled album is their debut release as the Constellative Trio, the three have played and recorded together before, albeit in different combinations. Mimmo and Waziniak were two-thirds of a trio with pianist Yoko Miura, whose wholly improvised program was recorded in France in 2018 and subsequently released on Mimmo’s now-defunct, and certainly missed, Amirani label. Mevel and Waziniak have played together as long ago as 1996 in the Gaël Mevel Trio, the third member being the superb double bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and then a few years later in the Gaël Mevel Quintet, which in addition to Mevel, Waziniak, and Avenel, included clarinetist Jacques Di Donato and cellist Didier Petit. For these groups Mevel played piano and composed in a rigorous style whose tonality and textures are more closely related to late Modernist composition than to jazz-derived music. In his more recent work he seems to have abandoned piano for cello, which latter instrument he plays on this recording. In addition to his work with other musicians, Mevel has also undertaken a number of duo collaborations with dancers, including Caroline Lagouge Chaussavoine and more recently, Namiko Gahier-Ogawa, with whom he improvised a piece around Japanese texts.

The music on this album was recorded in early June 2023, at La Maison en Bois in Abbeville la Riviére, during the trio’s tour of France. All of it was improvised.

The first sounds we hear are multiphonic chords broken by silences from the soprano saxophone. It is a kind of manifesto borne along on a handful of notes; Mimmo is signaling to us right away that the music will be as much about open spaces and sonorities as about melody and counterpoint. The playing on this first piece develops along minimalist lines, with Mimmo playing brief melodic fragments and Mevel centering himself on a drone tone altered through subtle changes in bowing. Waziniak’s nervous skittering adds a degree of tension that contrasts with the ruminative, longer-duration sounds from the saxophone and cello. Let the Shadow Come In maintains the introspective mood established by the first piece. Here Mimmo again plays with restraint; Waziniak’s drumming is muffled and sporadic; Mevel begins the piece pizzicato before moving to a brief unaccompanied arco solo. On Tale of the Shuffled Sheets a slightly more extroverted convergence of lines binds the cello and saxophone; the music then sets itself decisively in a jazz-inflected direction with Mevel’s pizzicato playing alluding to a free jazz double bass and Waziniak very briefly yet unmistakably threatening to break out into a swing rhythm before Mimmo and Mevel tighten the reins with several close harmonies. Scattered Newspaper is played with a greater degree of abandonment driven by Mimmo’s nimble runs up and down the instrument’s compass as well as by Waziniak’s restless work on tom-toms.

In addition to the longer improvisations, the album contains several interludes or “bagatelles,” generally shorter pieces named for colors. These interludes highlight the work of a trio that can express as much through concision as other, more prolix players, can at length.