The sonorities on this disc are sure to provide listeners with many moments of rapture; played with sensitivity and imagination, the music here is pure beauty. Delbec's piano shimmers with scintillating voicings and delicate, web-like melodic developments. He is more than ably seconded by Marc Turner's velvety tenor sax, with a tone that seems on the verge of breaking into pieces, so stretched and full to bursting. And what a great choice to include the viola, played by Oene Van Geel, to provide imaginative contrapuntal arabesques! Mark Helias on bass and Emile Biayenda on drums subtly support the melodic and harmonic voices.
Hailing from France, Delbec is someone deserving of attention on this continent, if this disc is any indication. Straddling the risky borders between contemporary classical music and jazz via improvisational vehicles, Delbec pulls it all off with style and grace. Listen, for example to the luminous "Le meme jour" or the finely layered "Pointe de la courte dune." On almost every cut, the Delbec Unit delivers high quality playing that seamlessly melds composition and improvisation, group and individual ideas, as each musician so obviously listens and responds, an essential for happening jazz. The music, grounded in contemporary idioms of all sorts, also has prominent traces of the lyricism of a Poulenc or the quirky melodic directions of a Stravinsky, with some of the dry humor of the former and the rhythmic adventurousness of the latter (as in the slip-slidy theme of the opener). Despite the imaginative abandon of the playing, the Benoit Delbec Unit has a very appealing restraint in matters of tone, balanced by the energy of the rhythms and eclectic exoticism, as in the last cut, "Au Louvre," where North African melodic angularity meets urban drive. The musicians play to the edge of their limits in inspired compositions to create a disc of the finest order.
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