(Avant-Garde Jazz / Free Improvisation) [CD] Sophie Agnel, John Edwards, Steve Noble - Meteo - 2013, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Normally, a jazz piano trio is like a pyramid, with the pianist at the pointing top and both bassist and drummer on the left and right sides of the bottom. Not in the case of Meteo, the project involving French Grand player Sophie Agnel and British rhythm destroyers John Edwards and Steve Noble: what they create is a circle. To be exact: a circle of fullness, not emptiness. The same fat circle with which composer Giacinto Scelsi represented sound. Outside of the logics patterned by Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau and Jason Moran, this piano-double bass-drums combination has no hierarchies (everybody leads, everybody follows) and deals with the inner properties of sound itself, feeding from Scelsi’s example. Much of the time, Agnel plays standing, manipulating the interior of the piano with hands and objects. In the middle of the abstract noises coming from it we hear a particular succession of pure notes, the fragment of a melody. Inside all the rumble and thunder maintained by Edwards and Noble we recognize a steady pulsation. There’s no limits for what these three do: they’re atonal, microtonal and tonal in only few minutes. As the liner notes of the CD say, «they flirt with all genres, intensities and intensions»...
~ cleanfeed-records.com
* * *
The liner notes said it best, ..."listening is a form of improvisation." To be sure, no two listeners come away from Meteo with the same experience. This single track (38:25) live recording from the 2012 Festival Météo in Mulhouse France is a first time meeting of the French pianist Sophie Agnel and the British rhythm section of John Edwards (bass) and Steve Noble (drums).
While rhythm is often an intramural device, here it is a highly personal interchange between masterly improvisers. Agnel, a classically trained pianist, has focused her energies on free improvisation, prepared piano, and music beyond category like fellow musicians Stéphane Rives, Michel Doneda, and Jean-Luc Guionnet. Edwards and Noble are two-thirds of the band Decoy with pianist Alexander Hawkins, members of the London Improvisers Orchestra, and have backed the jazz giants Joe McPhee, Lol Coxhill, Alan Wilkinson, and Peter Brotzmann.
The disc begins with a crash and rattle of drum and cymbal and the simultaneous manipulation of both inside and outside of the piano. The trio sets a pulse that they return to, but not until they have traced a line from tonal to atonal music and silence to noise. Agnel works with a palette of new piano sounds, like a saxophonist's extended technique, dealing with the physicality of her instrument. Likewise Edwards and Noble are often scraping an exorcism of sound from their instruments. With barely a pause for ideas, the applied cymbal strike, the woodiness of the bass and the harp-like qualities of the piano's insides yield an energy that climaxes somewhere at 31 minutes. Exhaustion follows, and the shortish (by digital standards) piece requires no more time to qualify as a nonpareil.
~ Mark Corroto ~ allaboutjazz.com

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 1 from 15. November 2010
EAC extraction logfile from 10. April 2014, 21:17
Sophie Agnel / Meteo
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TOC of the extracted CD
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