Paris-based avant-jazz quartet celebrate their 25th anniversary with a brilliant collection of new compositions.

This Paris-based avant-jazz quartet, one of the most notable groups on the European scene, celebrate their 25th anniversary with a brilliant collection of new compositions. Their sixth album displays the group's many strengths - unique sound, deep collective improvisation, power with subtlety, chamber music attention to detail. Lively, unconventional forms define a musical conversation open to wide-ranging influences, from the free jazz of the 60s and M-base to contemporary classical and traditional musics.

The band consists of Benoît Delbecq (piano), Guillaume Orti (saxophones), Hubert Dupont (bass) and Stéphane Galland (drums).

The group was influenced when it began in 1989 by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Steve Coleman, Steve Lacy and Dave Holland among others. It utilizes shifting and open compositional structures, tempo changes and polyrhythms to create music in continuous motion around the four players. Stéphane Ollivier, writing in the French Jazz Magazine, calls it 'a music that reconciles intellect and intuition as it combines a quasi-mathematical rigour with sensitivity, an instrumental originality and an attention to detail forged by the supreme exercise of open improvisation.'

Pianist Delbecq has been acclaimed for his many solo and duo releases on Songlines and other labels, as well as in collectives that include Taylor Ho Bynum/Mary Halvorsen/Tomas Fujiwara and Samuel Blaser/Gerry Hemingway, and in groups led by John Hébert, François Houle and Bobby Previte. His superb audiophile production here is a definite plus.

Track Listing

• Xy
• X
• You Dig
• Gazzell
• Binoculars
• Corps Chromé
• Pass Pass
• Red House in Nola
• I.E.S.
• Never Rain
• Tayls
• Xyz

Additional Details

Label: Songlines

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 57 mins

Release Date: 01/26/14

UPC: 774355160527