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François Carrier
Travelling Lights
Recorded Sound
Over the past few years François Carrier and his trio have invited an impressive list of special guests, such as Jason Moran, Bobo Stenson and Uri Caine, to perform with them in concert. Every once in a while these collaborations have extended into the recording studio, as All'Alba from 2001, featuring New-York based pianist Uri Caine. Carrier's latest collaboration, with pianist Paul Bley and bassist Gary Peacock, stems from a concert given at last year's FIJM. The resulting CD, Travelling Lights, is a completely improvised suite of compositions on a geographical theme with titles like "Americas," "Asia" and "Oceania," for example.
Carrier's regular drummer Michel Lambert, rounds out this rather unconventional quartet - unconventional because the four musicians rarely play together as a whole, preferring to break up into solo, duets and trio configurations of various kind.
Although François Carrier is the leader, Paul Bley stamps his very large fingerprints all over this project. Like Bley's own recordings, Travelling Lights consists of spars, darkly lyrical, quietly intense music that unravels organically at a slow, deliberate pace, favoring a limited tonal palette with lots of blank canvas. Bley often plays fragments of melody, allowing individual notes to decay into silence. Sometimes he follows this up unpredictably with explosive clusters of notes, sounding almost like a streamlined Cecil Taylor. Carrier performs strongly through out as well, registering powerful, acidy solos on the opener "Americas" and the most fully realized piece of music on this session, "Antartica". Carrier's alto playing combines Middle Eastern or Klezmer-like harmonies with the biting tone of Ornette Coleman.
Free improvisation without any pre-existing reference points usually ends up sounding like an interesting experiment rather than a deeply satisfying or meaningful listening experience. So, despite some excellent musicianship and some strikingly beautiful moments, too much of the music on Travelling Lights meanders around aimlessly without going anywhere in particular.
Reviewed by Neil Henden
Winter / Spring 2004
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