Lefebvre

This story begins with just one sound, originating in the place which Berlin jazz people think of as their living room, the A-Trane. Back in December 2019, the club was host to four leading figures in today’s improvised music scene, who turned this cozy space into their blank canvas, their research lab. In eight sets over four nights, piano phenomenon Michael Wollny, re-inventor of the soprano saxophone Emile Parisien, electric bass icon Tim Lefebvre, and that free spirit of the drum kit Christian Lillinger were given free rein.

"As an improviser, you often find that it‘s not the compositions themselves you‘re playing, but your own memories of them. And as these memories come back to you in the moment, they assert their continuing existence in the here and now," says Michael Wollny. In other words, songs are like ghosts. Wollny‘s new album "Ghosts" is a gathering of some of the ghosts that regularly haunt him. Typically for Wollny, they range from classics like Franz Schubert's "Erlkönig" to jazz standards, film music, songs with a certain fragility by Nick Cave, say, or the band Timber Timbre, and also include his own darkly evocative original compositions.

Maurice Ravel, a versatile and eclectic composer, took his inspiration from many sources, but especially and most constantly throughout his life, from music of the Eighteenth Century: that of French Baroque. His Menuet antique, Pavane pour une infante défunte, Valses nobles et sentimentales (title chosen in homage to Franz Schubert) and Tombeau de Couperin are fine illustrations of that interest and inspiration, and they are the works presented on this new recording by Clément Lefebvre. After a first CD devoted to Rameau and Couperin, that makes perfect sense.