THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: December 2024

Description: A 25th-anniversary album finds the quartet on heartfelt form

Musicians: Ébène Quartet

Works: Arrangements of jazz tracks by Kenny Kirkland, Miles Davis, Toots Thielemans, Erroll Louis Garner, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk and Alfred James Ellis

Catalogue number: Erato 5054197897894 

Since its earliest days the Ébène Quartet has warmly incorporated jazz and pop arrangements alongside the likes of Beethoven and Ravel into its repertoire. Playing enthusiastically and idiomatically across genres has become part of the foursome’s identity – but, we might wonder, for how much longer?

The title of the quartet’s new, all-jazz compilation serves as a threefold play on words: as a tribute to the iconic 1958 Miles Davis jazz album of the same name; as a celebration of its own landmark quarter-century of existence; and also as a more poignant milestone, marking the departure of founding cellist Raphaël Merlin, the quartet’s arranger-in-chief, and the player responsible for reimagining all ten jazz tracks here as thoroughly convincing quartet works – by turns sophisticated, gutsy and seductive.

Merlin is a marvel at harnessing the inner workings of quartet textures for vivid jazz effect, from the accordion-like wheezing opening harmonies of Kenny Kirkland’s ‘Dienda’ to the crisp rhythmic explosions in Alfred James Ellis’s brash and zany ‘Chicken’. But there’s clearly a deep understanding and love for jazz from all four players, notably first violinist Pierre Colombet, who offers a beguiling duet with Merlin in the central section of Wayne Shorter’s ‘Ana Maria’.

It’s a disc to entertain and captivate, but also one that rewards just as close, detailed listening as any classical offering. Merlin himself gets a lithe solo in the closing ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, originally Charles Mingus’s elegy for the recently departed Lester Young, but here a poignant farewell marking a departure of a different kind. The musicians are captured in warm, close recorded sound.

DAVID KETTLE

from www.thestrad.com