During his musical career, Anton Webern refined his use of serial composition to near perfection. It was a move toward pointillism. Extreme shifts of timbre and range among small, quiet ensembles allowed this lapidary of tone to pare away the inessentials and create tiny gems of music. To the credit of composer-bassist Stephane Furic Leibovici, something of Webern's arid precision is evoked by the pieces on this new disc.
This is especially true of the fragile menagerie making up the first five tracks. These "Carter Variations I-V" are tiny sculptures made of quiet beams of sound. Clocking at or around a minute each, these pieces for saxophone, clarinet, and double bass give the players just enough time and space to whittle tiny abstracts with their own idiosyncratic beauty.
While the pieces that comprise this opening suite are less "classical," they retain some of the serialist's austerity. Leibovici generally provides a very slow, ambling pulse, above which Speed (clarinet) and Cheek (saxophones) weave careful composed and improvised harmonies. "A Music of Tranquility" and "Three kinds of folks" are framed by peppy rhythmic figures, but their mid-sections largely tread as carefully as the rest of the album.
Besides Leibovici's compositional skill, another stand-out feature of this CD is the interplay between the players, especially the horns. Using an improvisational approach similar that of Joe and Mat Maneri in their ensembles, the horn players intertwine their phrases, carefully listening to and playing off of one another.
For such a soft-spoken group, though, that depends so heavily on careful tonal interplay, these players rarely project a sense of hesitancy. The mood is more thoughtful, contemplative, or, in some sections, surreal. As Leibovici is quote in the liner notes, he prefers "to be gentle with the sounds they have a life of their own to listen and let them come to me. I don't push them around. I listen to the inside of them."
Jugendstil documents a unique style of composition/improvisation. It is, I suppose, a minimalist approach. And like the finest forms of minimalism in any art form, it works because it distills its sources to their essences, stripping away the excesses and avoiding lapses of attention.
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