French alto saxophonist Pierrick Pédron came to my attention over a decade ago with strangely brilliant pair of recordings for ACT Music. Kubic’s Monk (2012) found him approaching Thelonious Monk with a piano-less quartet featuring trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and the music was clearly under the influence of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. In Kubic’s Cure (2014), Pédron took perhaps an even greater leap into the unknown, Pédron dramatically re-contextualising the music of English goth-rock band The Cure within a post-bop framework.

In many respects, this latest project is the inverse image of the Monk project, a reappraisal of Ornette Coleman’s 1959 landmark The Shape Of Jazz To Come by a quartet which, as you might have guessed, prominently features a piano. Very much a joint venture with arrangers Laurent Courthaliac and Daniel Yvinec, they were seeking to uncover hitherto concealed harmonic possibilities within Coleman’s classic material. It is also the first recording from an impressive new quartet which features rising star Carl-Henri Morisset (piano), the ever-dependable Thomas Bramerie (bass) and Elie Martin Charrière (drums), a group that has been touring since 2019.

Aside from preserving the original running order and a not too subtle nod to the original cover art, the arrangements cleverly interpolate Coleman’s music rather than recreating it in any literal sense. Inserting a piano into Coleman’s famously non-chordal music instantly changes the rules of engagement, something which is immediately apparent on the intro to ‘Lonely Woman’. In another context the spare arrangement could be a prelude to ‘Harlem Nocturne’, and although Pédron’s spine-tingling alto reveals a flash of Coleman’s distinctive vibrato, his angular solo develops into something altogether more contemporary. The frenzied melodic loop which announces ‘Eventually’ is almost as unexpected as Morriset’s stride piano break, though the eternally beautiful ’Peace’ is taken rather more slowly, Bramerie’s ruminative solo interlude sustaining an atmosphere before Morriset and Pédron enter to raise the stakes.

Elsewhere the bold staccato theme of ‘Focus On Sanity’ is cleverly concealed within a deep blue ballad, while the first section of ‘Congeniality’ finds Pédron at his fiery best, mining a modal ostinato before the brilliant Morriset then branches out into an Afro-Cuban tour de force. Closing out with ‘Chronology’, it is played with a freedom more redolent of the late ‘60s New Thing than Coleman’s relatively conservative experiments of a decade earlier, and Charrière is particularly impressive as he stokes the flames.

If musical homages can often be something of a curate’s egg – a disappointing substitute for original material – Pédron has an uncanny knack for squaring the circle. An album imbued with Coleman’s fearless spirit, but ultimately it’s also a great example of Pédron’s own considerable originality.

from https://ukjazznews.com