Colin Vallon
Le Vent
ECM ***1/2
With a different drummer this time, pianist Colin Vallon is still in trio mode. And it’s an intimate Gustavsen-like experience once more, one with a heightened more dramatic scale and procedure than Rruga recorded three years earlier.
With bassist Patrice Moret retained, and Julian Sartorius on drums instead of Rruga’s Samuel Rohrer, there’s a hushed atmosphere as the pervasive mood, the title track with tinkling almost bell-like percussion at the beginning that has a certain grandeur to it and a great deal of echo-ey atmosphere.
While the album is, lets not make any bones about it, highly serious and sometimes quite taut, there is a beauty in this strength rather than a paralysis although I think you need to be especially patient in its more glacial moments, for instance on the fifth track ‘Fade’, with demanding, glassy, bass legato lines against slow piano development perhaps not achieving quite the effect you might necessarily anticipate.
The thud of the processed drums at the beginning of ‘Goodbye’ could take the band off in a different electronic dance direction but isn’t ultimately so easily distracted, again the atmosphere moody but a bit more relenting.
Recorded quite beautifully at Rainbow by the great Jan Erik Kongshaug in April last year Le Vent is more of a statement than Rruga was, but there’s still the library-like levels of contemplation that came across on the very different 2012 album Matanë Malit, Vallon’s wife singer Elina Duni’s record that Vallon and Moret also played on. And maybe Vallon needs to show us a little more of his range to illuminate that extraordinary touch of his, along the lines of the new timbres thrown up on the much more animated ‘Rouge’, for the wind to be truly blowing in the right direction. SG
Just released
Patrice Moret above left, Julian Sartorius, and Colin Vallon. Photo Nicolas Masson / ECM