Daunik Lazro - Recent Releases Old and New

The Free Jazz Collective 0

A little while ago, Free Jazz Blog contributor David Cristol interviewed French saxophonist Daunik Lazro (here)- shedding a bit of light on a seminal figure in the development of French free improvisation. Over the past few years, Lazro has been actively filling in the gaps of his already impressive discography with archival recordings on mainly (but not limited to) Fou Records. Over the next several days Stuart Broomer, Paul Acquaro and Stef Gijssels will explore many of these recordings.

By Stuart Broomer

Annick Nozati, Daunik Lazro - Sept Fables Sur L'Invisible (Mazeto Square, 2024) (Recorded 1994)

This duet was recorded at the 11^th edition of Festival Musique Action in May 1994. Nozati is credited with voice and texts, Lazro with alto and baritone saxophones. It is work of the rarest quality, testament of empathy, dreamscape, collaboration of great technical resource. Novati, among the most expressive of improvising vocalists, can also be among the most restrained, reducing her sound to the purest expression, whether executing wide intervals or tracing the subtlest gradations of pitch. These spontaneous songs often stretch tones beyond anything recognizable as verbal. Voice and saxophone proceed with an intimate entwining of lines. The two first tracks are the longest, each developed brilliantly. With “A’loré” we are immediately immersed in an unknown world, Nozati’s voice is a somber, slightly gravelly, invocation, Lazro’s alto possesses a lightness approaching the timbre of a flute; eventually Nozati’s voice will grow in intensity, but an intensity that is tightly controlled, while Lazro’s sound becomes wholly saxophone, sweetly abrasive, subtly multiphonic, fluttering from register to register, the whole a triumph of emotional depth. “Alterné”, the following track, continues the profundity in very different ways, beginning with a solo baritone saxophone that Nozati eventually joins in a duo of breathtaking exactitude of pitch, the two “voices” mirroring and complementing one another. Those qualities are developed throughout.

Daunik Lazro/ Carlos Alves "Zingaro"/ Joëlle Léandre/ Paul Lovens - Madly You (Fou, 2024) (Recorded 2001)

Madly You, initially released on Potlatch in 2002, was recorded at the Banlieues Bleues Festival in 2001 and places Lazro squarely and fittingly in a quartet of master improvisers and contemporaries – bassist (and vocalist) Joëlle Léandre, violinist Carlos “Zingaro”, drummerPaul Lovens – all marked by an ability, and willingness, to find a unique collective vision, exercising rare, collective genius. Within the first minute of the opening “Madly You”, the four have begun to construct an original space in an interweave of bowed string harmonics from Léandre and “Zingaro”, distinguishable primarily by register and resonance, a duet that continues for an extended period with Lovens’ tidily minimalist, Asiatic abstraction and punctuation of taut drum and shimmering metal, eventually leading to a triumphal veil too translucent to be called a drum solo. Lazro’s entry on baritone straddles a large mammal’s eerie pain and a bank of oscillators, soon calling up a sympathetic whistling of arco strings. Everything is in flux, including the baritone’s high-speed flight in barely accented lines, then the shifting dialogue is sustained without longueurs to slightly over forty minutes, including whispering baritone saxophone (remarkably, Lazaro can play violently and dizzyingly quietly), pizzicato bass, violin and drums, the whole sometimes devoted to a collective skittering in which delineations of identity are under scrutiny. There’s also a march. The following “Lyou Mad”, at about half the length, sustains the quality, with Lazro’s baritone foregrounded and Léandre and “Zingaro” creating squall as well as chamber textures.

Sophie Agnel/ “Kristoff K. Roll”/ Daunik Lazro - Quartet un peu Tendre (Fou Records, 2024) (Recorded 2020/21)

Collective genius is invariably social. Here that dimension is insistent.

Quartet un peu tendre (the title is ironic) matches Lazro’s baritone with Sophie Agnel’s piano and the electronic devices of “Kristoff K. Roll”, the duo

Of J-Kristoff Camps and Carole Rieussec. There are two extended pieces: “au départ c’est une photo” (“At the Beginning It's a Photo”) and “l’hiver sera chaud” (“winter will be warm), 31 and 41 minutes respectively. It’s collective improvisation, but the collection of sound sources employed by the Kristoff K. Roll duo take it to other dimensions, from found sound and musique concrète, extended sound samples of a speech, a pitch-distorted children’s choir and various synthesized elements. The cumulative effect may some feel opposite to the intense “live” improvisation of Sept Fables or Madly You. That immediate sense of place and time is here displaced by a compound experience, the instrumental resources of Lazro and Agnel drawn into a kind of compound nowhere, a theatre without walls in which the lost, found and immediate mingle together, elsewhere and nowhere with now, then and maybe in a compound experience of never and somewhere.

There’s a beautiful moment of temporality, almost a lullaby amidst “au départ c’est…” (that time frame might be ironic, the warm winter, too) in which Lazro plays the sweetest of reveries accompanied by only Agnel’s lightly articulated, damped intervals. When other elements enter, quiet and abstracted, they do not disrupt the effect but nonetheless strangely compound the time, eventually situating the duo in a kind of unidentifiable field, industrial, intimate, unknowable.

“L’hiver sera chaud” will take this even further, beginning with an animated crowd scene that includes both a central orator and shouting children, suggesting a post-colonial third world –a documentary that partners with the passionate or profoundly considered improvisations to create a compound time of inter-related realities and responsibilities. Dogmatic? Hardly. Subtleties abound: a piano plays in a dry acoustic; simultaneous random percussion is alive with resonant overtones. Lazar’s baritone wanders through an industrial forcefield and a windfarm. I want my best of ’24 lists back for revision. This “tender quartet”, this multiverse of living tissue, insists.

quartet un peu tendre by Daunik Lazro, Kristoff K Roll ( Carole Rieussec et J-Kristoff Camps), sophie Agnel

Thu Aug 14 04:00:00 GMT 2025

The Free Jazz Collective 0

Today is the second installment of an overview of French saxophonist Daunik Lazro's recent archival releases. See part one here.

By Paul Acquaro

Jean-Jacques Avenel - Siegfried Kessler - Daunik Lazro - Ecstatic Jazz (Crypte Des Franciscains Béziers 12 Février 1982) (Fou, 2023) (Recorded 1982)

"In Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe, in the hope that young people would venture to the concert, the name "ecstatic jazz" was often used," explains Lazro in a 2023 interview here. "For example, in February 2000, the day before the trio with Peter Kowald and Annick Nozati, Kowald had invited me for a duet in Torino, where we played under the banner Ecstatic Jazz, in front of an audience of young people in a trance. They seemed to dig our music since they danced to it."

Are you skeptical of the last assertion? Well, going to back to this release from Fou Records, it may not be so unimaginable. The recording, an unearthed tape of a show from 1982, after a slow coalescing of sounds, begins exuding rhythmic pulses. Jean Jacques Avenel's bass carries this pulse the furthest with an extended solo passage... one can feel the impulse to move growing. Possessed vocalizations follow, but the bass keeps everything moving along. Then, the track splits. We hear a slightly wavering tone of an electric piano joins the sonic landscape. At first it is just the keyboard and bass, then there is a percussive sound ... maybe a prepared piano? The group locks into a groove and the electric piano gets tangled up with the bass. This continues to solidify into a grooving passage. The conventional gives way to free playing, and Daunik finally enters with a piercing line. He's been missing until now and his injection increases the energy, as his lines coil ever tighter.

The next track split, '1c,' introduces a new mood. Pensive piano, restrained bass, the piece grows in volume and pace as a slight streak of modal, spiritual playing creeps in. The audience may have been swaying up to now but here is the first real glimpse of ecstasy. Lazro enters and he is a vector of energy. By the time the hit the mid-point of track 3, they have achieved an enlightenment. Is it ecstatic? totally. Were the kids dancing to it? maybe. It is a fantastic statement of free improvisation, melodic invention, and pure swirling energy, imbued with the energy of say late John Coltrane.

The next piece is much different. Kessler is playing electronics and the music is even more contemporary sounding than the first. It begins with an intense blast of electronics, 1982 electronics, but sounding contemporary. This set of tracks is more textured, for example after '2a''s electronics, '2b' offers new musical timbers with Kessler switching things up with the flute, and '2c' finds the trio in a jaggedly interlocking groove, then making some accessible modal jazz. The last track, '2d', is most satisfying, as the group explores the spiritual sound again, the piano holding back as the songs ends to enthusiastic applause.

Lazro's partners here, Kessler and Avenel, are two musicians who were integral to his playing and development, as well as the development of free music in France at the time. The recording is archival, it is not the cleanest, clearest of recordings, but as a tape from 1982, it captures the energy perfectly ... something clearer may have actually lost some spirit.

Ecstatic Jazz by Avenel-Kessler-Lazro

Jean-Jacques Avenel - Daunik Lazro – Duo (Bibliothèque De Massy 16 Novembre 1980) (Fou Records, 2024) (Recorded 1980)

Duo is a previously unreleased recording by Jean-Jacques Avenel and Daunik Lazro, captured to tape during a concert at the Bibliothèque de Massy in 1980. The first track names an imaginary encounter between John Tchicai and Jimmy Lyons in Maghreb, while the second pays tribute to Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton. The duo's music is indeed radical improvisation and stylistic versatility, which, some may say, brought to bear a new legacy of free jazz in France. In the liner notes, Lazro expresses that how this to him is a seminal recording, a document showing that "In 1980, some French musicians had invented their own jazz, freed from its rehtoric and fomalism. Post free, not yet free improv, music was already there, in its splendour."

As to the first track, the opening moments reveal the close connection of the two players. Rhythmic and skeletal, Avenel bows an urgent figure and Lazro throws complimentary staccato notes against the taut lines. Tense and melodically confined, Lazro drops out and Avenel continues to erect a rhythmic structure. When Lazro rejoins, he plays more emotively, with a tone that is reminiscent of a more ancient, preening sound. One may detect the 'Mahgreb' in the sounds and rhythms that they two employed, distinctly of abstracted northern African influence. The second track, the one that name checks Lacy and Braxton is as energetic and intense as the first, but seems to invoke more squeals and smears from the sax and frenetic bow strikes from the bass. It feels more concentric and swirling, repetitions and diverging patterns changing suddenly, overlapping and disappearing.

The album 'Duo' should be considered an essential piece of free jazz, capturing the intensity and complicity between Avenel and Lazro.

Daunik Lazro - Paul Lovens - Annick Nozati - Fred Van Hove – Résumé Of A Century (Fou, 2024) (Recorded 1999)

"Venturing into a record or a performance by Daunik Lazro is not an innocuous experience. You have to fully commit for the duration of the session. It can be intimidating, because you’re sure to tread unto unheard territory. Abandon all cues upon entering. In the end it is all about communion, between the players, and with the audience," so writes David Cristol in his intro to his aforementioned interview with Lazro. These words linger as I try to penetrate the layers of Resume of A Century, another archival recording from Lazro's archives. It is a tough one. The quartet is Lazro on alto and baritone saxes, Paul Lovens on drums and percussion (including saw), Fred Van Hove on piano and accordion and vocalist Annick Nozati. For me, Nozati's intense vocalizations are tough, even as a seasoned listener of experimental music. From the start, the operatic, dramatic and unbelievable dynamic Nozati is an integral piece of the music. Lazro too. He matches the vocals with his own squelching baritone sax as Lovens and Van Hove create a harmonic and percussive structure for the unsettling tones.

Stuart Broomer, in his liner notes to the record, provides a perfect encapsulation of the recording when we writes: "What doe the wildly divergent voices of Van Hove, Lovens, Nozati and Lazro have in common? Here, perhaps, everything, for they have constructed a work that poses both and ideal of incongruity and a consistent art that ranges freely, and usually simultaneously between refinement and brutality, elegance and torture, pure song an unadulterated, impassioned screaming." In only the first third of the half-hour long first track, "Facing the Facts," all of these descriptors have been dynamically expressed.

While recorded at the very end of the last century, the album feels like a wholly appropriate soundtrack to the current decade. Listen if you dare, and I do dare you.

Fri Aug 15 04:00:00 GMT 2025

The Free Jazz Collective 0

Today is the third and final installment of an overview of French saxophonist Daunik Lazro's recent archival releases. See part one and part two.

Daunik Lazro, Jean-Jacques Avenel, Tristan Honsinger - True & Whole Tones in Rhythms (Fou Records, 2024)

By Stef Gijssels

Ever since listening to "Pourtant Les Cimes" with Benjamin Duboc and Didier Lasserre, I've been a great fan of the French saxophonist's art, later confirmed by an equally 5-star rated "Hasparren", a duo album with Joëlle Léandre on bass, and his collaborations with Joe McPhee.

The music on this album was recorded live at Dunois Theater, in May 1982, then still located at Rue Dunois 28 in Paris. The organisation moved to another place in the 90s but kept its name.

The album comes with a short text by French surrealist and avant-garde artist Antonin Artaud, taken from the preface of his essay "Le théâtre et son double" (1938):

"Aussi bien, quand nous prononçons le mot de vie, faut-il entendre qu’il ne s’agit pas de la vie reconnue par le dehors des faits, mais de cette sorte de fragile et remuant foyer auquel ne touchent pas les formes. Et s’il est encore quelque chose d’infernal et de véritablement maudit dans ce temps, c’est de s’attarder artistiquement sur des formes, au lieu d’être comme des suppliciés que l’on brûle et qui font des signes sur leurs bûchers"

And in translation:

"Furthermore, when we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames". (Translated by Caroline Richards, 1958)

Indeed, a quite brutal vision, which is also Artaud's view on art, further exemplified by his Theater of Cruelty, where he wants to do away with a clear plot, and just provide a sequence of "violent physical images", which would "crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator".

This harsh description is only partly to be found on this album. The form is free indeed in the two long pieces, there is no clear structure or form to guide the interaction between all three players. Yet, the cruelty is luckily absent but without diminishing the power and intensity of the improvisers' skills. On both pieces they take ample time to expand, to explore, to change tone and atmosphere, smartly including some existing themes from all three musicians. "Ever Never" from Honsingers' "Lavoro" (1981), "Pat." by Lazro on the first piece, and on the second "Cordered" (1980) by Lazro and Avenel's "Canoë", later to become the opening track of his album "Eclaircie" (1985).

All three are in great shape: Lazro's piercing alto gives vent to his deepest emotions and ideas, Honsinger's cello and vocals move between the brutal and the tender, and Avenel adds depth and glue to the entire performance - but also listen to the latter's fun solo on the second track, sharing some of his African musical influences. The quality of the recording is excellent, giving the impression of being present. Despite is complete free form, the whole performance is quite intimate and personal.

It is about "life" - brutal, hard, but also playful and intimate. Luckily none of the "violent physical images" were needed to make this an enjoyable album.

Sat Aug 16 04:00:00 GMT 2025