Jérôme Lefebvre FMR Orchestra
May 8, 2024Jusqu’où S’évapore La Musique?
Altrasuoni AS 375
Completely French, but with echoes of West Coast and Free Jazz, guitarist Jérôme Lefebvre’s FMR Orchestra plays this 14-track suite with a mixture of aplomb and aggression. The guitarist, who has worked with players as different as Kenny Baron and Joëlle Léandre, marshals the skills of his six-person orchestra, whose members have similar backgrounds to his, to emphasize these currents as well as detours into swing, pure improv and Rock.
With each musical motif bleeding into the next, the usual paradigm is to express Lefebvre’s compositions with layered group textures, harmonized from top to bottom. As well five “Transitions” allow soloists to express individual variations, usually with more exploratory touches than in the group work. This is especially apparent with “Transition #3” and “Transition #4”, The former is dedicated to clips, ricochets and bottom strokes from bassist Benoît Keller that introduce closely united low-pitched drones from reed players Loïc and Guillaume Orti heard on the subsequent track.
Interestingly enough “Transition #4” is another reed showcase which emphasize altissimo whines, tongue slaps and doit echoes. This time however the following “Strange feeling” relates on one hand to Rock music, with Lefebvre’s emphasized twangs and paradiddles from drummer Daniel Jeand’Heur, and on the other hand to Free Music as Orti’s saxophone squeaks meet ascending bugling from trumpeter Timothée Quost until the piece climaxes with a swing groove from the entire band.
Elsewhere Vergnaux’s clarinet is sometimes harmonized with simple acoustic-style guitar frails or Quost creates an interlude of fleet tongued triplets, rips and resonating smears. Other times the horn interlacing can intimate Medieval plainsong or take the form of a quasi-rondo. Spurred on at times by hectoring voices and gurgling yells, the band’s most common default is to harmonic unity.
This is confirmed during “Bordello con expressividad” the extended and concluding stentorian track. Numerous tutti expressions undulate to whole band concentrated flutters and strokes at the finale. But before that twisting guitar flanges, reed honks, cymbal shakes and a singing flugelhorn portamento are heard before the multiple timbral associations.
It’s not clear on which French coast Lefebvre was raised. Yet parts of this suite manages to put a worldly contemporary hue onto a variant of breezy West Coast jazz.
–Ken Waxman
Track Listing: 1. Ouverture 2. À Courbet 3. Transition #1 4. Le petit matin du peintre 5. Transition #2 6. La sieste 7. Transition #3 8. Grave ballade 9. Transition #4 10. Strange feeling 11. Yves 12. Transition #5 13. Jusqu’où s’évapore la musique ? 14. Bordello con expressividad
Personnel: Timothée Quost (trumpet, flugelhorn and electronics); Loïc Vergnaux (clarinet, bass clarinet); Guillaume Orti (alto, soprano, C-melody saxophones); Jérôme Lefebvre (guitar); Benoît Keller (bass) and Daniel Jeand’Heur (drums)