Benoît Delbecq - The Weight of Light (February 2021 Pyroclastic Records)

Paris-based artist Benoît Delbecq releases multimedia-inspired solo piano

album The Weight of Light

available on Pyroclastic Records

“Benoît Delbecq is one of the few true improvising piano geniuses of our times. He has

steadfastly created his own musical universe of sound, impeccable craft and beauty that is

wondrous, resonant and free in the best sense of the word.” — Fred Hersch, pianist and composer

“[Music of] exotic and mysterious qualities” — Bill Shoemaker, JazzTimes

“Delbecq likes to go beyond normal technique. He puts things on and between the piano strings to

make it a raw and sensitive percussion machine.”— Ben Ratliff, The New York Times

Internationally acclaimed pianist and composer Benoît Delbecq issues The Weight of Light on Pyroclastic Records, his first solo release in more than a decade. Following intentional exploration and years of extended research, confronting the smooth and the striated within his playing, the Paris-based artist now offers open-eared listeners new, deeply personal connections to the music inspired by movementcentric perspectives on shadow and light.

Within trancelike chambers and subtle interluding halls, Delbecq conjures the mysterious ecstasy of transitional imagery. Nine tracks of original music pivot across contemplative brightness and ethereal darkness. Serving spontaneity, each gesture reflects a translation of feeling and invites listeners to engage their own emotional responses to the music, as they listen in real time.

Ever curious about visual representation of music, Delbecq has been enhancing versions of his own graphic notation for years. But as he composed music for The Weight of Light, he began recognizing how hanging mobiles wield influence over his relationship to music and, more broadly, artistic expression.

“That was totally unconscious,” he says. As a child, he’d regard a mobile casting shadows in his parents’ bedroom for minutes at a time. “The idea likely came from way back, but who can say?”

From that buried memory, Delbecq began drawing the image that would become his album cover for The Weight of Light. “I drew the record cover pretty fast, but the shadow took me days,” he says. “I wanted to render something mysterious about the shadow of this mobile.” That unnamed mystery rests at the consciousness of The Weight of Light and includes both physical and figurative interpretations.

Some 35 years ago, Delbecq’s physicist brother centered his Ph.D. around proving that light has a mass. At the time, the idea fascinated Delbecq. “Hardly any people know that light has a mass,” he says. For the album, he took poetic license to change “mass” to “weight,” intent on exploring what that concept might sound like on a piano.

Inspired by what he calls “real presences” within his artistry, Delbecq considers features of architecture when composing new music, including how different structures interact with light. One partly sunny morning, he found himself inside the Notre-Dame de Ronchamp chapel by Le Corbusier, observing the light coming through the stained glass windows. “A cloud passing by, revealing the sun inside the chapel, of course will change your relationship with the space you’re in,” he says. His Poe-like appraisal of light influencing emotional response to physical surroundings persists across The Weight of Light. “In that sense, that’s also weight of the light,” he says.

Delbecq regards piano as a vessel for expansion. His expert manipulation of the instrument presents patterns, pauses and un-patterns as on “Pair et Impair,” as well as sonic illusions such as left-hand “loops” on “Anamorphoses” and “The Loop of Chicago” that take shape and reshape throughout the compositions. Providing plenty of opportunity for listeners to experience starkness of time and space, Delbecq engages openness on “Au Fil de la Parole” and “Dripping Stones” the latter beginning as a cluster of tightly packed colors, primed for expansion. And he concludes in notes of dark and doleful lushness tinged with inquiry on “Broken World.”

For these renderings, Delbecq turns to perhaps the most prominent textural characteristic of his sound: prepared piano. And his love for those sounds emerged from his fascination for drummers he heard live, namely Kenny Clarke, Paul Motian, and Ed Blackwell. Textural possibilities serve his unique compositional development, particularly for The Weight of Light. “When I’m composing, it’s exactly like I’m looking at inventing the future shape of an object,” he says, “so I look at it from different places. It’s like a 3-D way of conceiving things that has to do with optical phenomena. If I move around it, it will reveal shapes that are hidden at other angles.”

Benoît Delbecq is a multi-awarded Parisian pianist and composer, engaging new textures and pulses on prepared piano. His musical force weaves compelling works inspired by varied sources including mathematics, poetry and architecture. Delbecq's works have received acclaim from legendary musicians such as Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy and György Ligeti, as well as from a long list of critics, peers and festivals curators. He studied improvised music with Alan Silva, founder of the Institute for Artistic and Cultural Perception in Paris, later receiving mentorship from Waldron. At the Banff Centre, Delbecq studied with Steve Coleman, Dave Holland and Muhal Richard Abrams, among other masters. He also studied composition and music analysis with Solange Ancona. Besides being a performer, composer and producer, Delbecq served as founder of the Hask Collective Paris (1992-2004) and is presently a founding member of Bureau de Son Paris (2008) and the dStream label.

 

1. The Loop of Chicago 08:00

2. Dripping Stones 03:07

3. Family Trees 04:15

4. Chemin sur le Crest 03:21

5. Au Fil de la Parole 02:25

6. Anamorphoses 07:37

7. Havn en Havre 05:30

8. Pair et Impair 09:47

9. Broken World 04:51

Benoît Delbecq - piano

In memoriam Ken Pickering and Philippe Bailleul

Recorded by Juien Bassères

Mixed by Benoît Delbecq at Bureau de Son Paris

Mastered by Klaus Scheuermann at 4ohm, Berlin

Piano Technician: Bastien Herbin

Pre-order

Benoît Delbecq / Jorrit Dijkstra / John Hollenbeck - Linger (DRIFF RECORDS October 1, 2018)

Dijkstra and Hollenbeck have been collaborating as a duo since the mid-nineties. Recorded as a follow-up on their well-received album Sequence (Trytone Records, 2005), Linger adds French prepared piano master Benoît Delbecq to the mix. Dijkstra and Delbecq met at the Banff Jazz Workshop in 1990 and have collaborated occasionally over the years. As on Sequence, the same process of instant composition was used in the studio: to establish some textures and atmospheres first, then record a few takes per texture, and choose the best takes afterwards without further editing. The titles of the ten tracks all reflect movement of some sort, represented by the multi-layered rhythms, the dense microtonal textures, and the lyrical, lingering melodic interactions of Dijkstra and Delbecq.

Delbecq’s mumbling bass synth lines, Dijkstra’s analog synth and processed saxophone sounds, and Hollenbeck’s hard-hitting grooves and almost electronic-sounding percussions give the album a unique sound that defies categories.

Benoît Delbecq - prepared piano, bass synth

Jorrit Dijkstra - alto saxophone, lyricon, analog electronics

John Hollenbeck – drums, percussion

1. Place 05:23

2. Relay 06:21

3. Linger 04:08

4. Stir 03:46

5. Hold 08:54

6. Stalk 05:37

7. Push 04:19

8. Poke 03:50

9. Dwell 04:58

10. Edge 04:57

All improvisations by Benoît Delbecq (SACEM), Jorrit Dijkstra (Buma/Stemra) and John Hollenbeck (ASCAP/GEMA).

Recorded by Eric Kilburn at Wellspring Studio, Acton MA on January 24, 2016. Mixed by Benoît Delbecq and Steve Argüelles at PlushSpace, Paris. Mastered by Myles Boisen at Headless Buddha Mastering Lab, Oakland CA. Cover art by Raoul van der Weide. Design by Hidde Dijkstra.

Photography by Valérie Archeno.

The Recyclers - Davout (dStream 2018)

The idea of the ‘piano trio’ perhaps suggests centrality for the pianist, but at least since the ground-breaking work of Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian this is not so – in such trios at their best, the piano, bass and drums are equal points of a triangle, three voices in ‘trialogue’. There is a radical spirit inherent in The Recyclers’ approach that celebrates the tradition of the piano trio, but sidesteps and offers inventive alternatives to it, setting up situations and ideas that push and pull it in new directions, recognising that music can be about ‘playing’ in every sense of the word.

The Recyclers formed in Paris in 1992, with Benoît Delbecq on piano, Steve Argüelles on drums and percussion, originally alongside the guitarist Noël Akchoté, who was replaced in 1999 by ‘Disco’ Christophe Minck on bass. On this album Minck enriches the sound by supplementing his bass guitar playing with the addition of moog, ngoni and harp. (The atmospheric saxophone of Antonin Tri Hoang adds further colour on one track too.) Anchored in a primarily acoustic sound world, the trio’s deft use of electronic effects provides an unobtrusive lift, countering, highlighting or elongating the natural acoustics of their instruments, or sometimes emphasising the open spaces of the music. 

The piano trio constitutes a contained space, but one within which Delbecq, Minck and Argüelles can still be relatively boundless in form and format. Like the best artists in any creative form, they carve out new pathways through traditional forms, re-making and multiplying their rhythmic relationship to them; deflecting, unravelling and rebuilding them melodically as they go. Their mutual understanding is based on generosity and alert listening so that their intertwined lines undulate like Möbius strips in ever-changing shadings. Their music possesses a rhythmic presence and melodic invention that eludes categorisation, as well as an undercurrent of pleasurable tension through the trio’s ability to change direction at any given moment.

We often speak of ‘making’ music, and this trio reveal how physical that act of making is. They confront us with their bodily reality through their interaction with their instruments and our own bodily reality as we engage with and respond to their music. The process of its construction is audible in its melodic flow, in the interruption to that flow by rhythmic twists and turns, and in the interlocking warp and weft of its textures. Defined by incessant motion, for its makers and its listeners, this music fires the imagination, takes you off on tangents, but keeps your (dancing) feet on the ground. It makes listening and hearing feel palpably fresh and vital. 

After repeated listening to this album I have found myself each time able to hear different sounds, rhythms, tones, or thoughts. It’s not too fanciful to think that there are ghosts in this music too – it was recorded in the legendary (and sadly recently closed) Studio Davout. Visual imagery of all kinds is conjured by these sounds, something that becomes more resonant with the knowledge that Studio Davout was housed in a former Paris cinema. And the legendary artists who recorded at the studios since their creation in 1965 range from Michel Legrand to Karlheinz Stockhausen, from Serge Gainsbourg to Archie Shepp, Nico to Keith Jarrett, Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln to The Skatalites, Dexter Gordon to Yo-Yo Ma, and from Talking Heads to Herbie Hancock. Recorded in such a mythic location, and paying tribute to it in the album’s title, the eclectic influences of this genre-defying music might have seeped through the studio walls as well as being ingrained in The Recyclers’ consciousness. 

Derek Horton

1. Whammy 05:53

2. Nouvettes 06:14

3. Caboose 08:20

4. Kitchen 02:17

5. Minaret 10:21

6. +X 08:23

Steve Argüelles - drums, percussion

Benoît Delbecq - piano

Christophe `Disco’ Minck - bass, moog, ngoni, harp

(#6 Antonin Tri-Hoang - tenor saxophone)

All compositions by Steve Argüelles

Recorded at Davout studios in Paris, France

Recorded by students of the ESIS `école supérieur de l’image et du son’ Matthieu Lefevre & Louis Roueche Rossi mentored by Samuel Navel

Mixed and edited by Steve Argüelles at Plushspace

Mastered by Philippe Teissier du Cros

Session photos by Igor Juget

Production déléguée pour dStream/ Bureau de Son - Charlène Pré

Bureau de son est soutenu par la DRAC île de france - Ministère de la culture

The Recyclers - Studio Davout - Teaser from Igor Juget on Vimeo.

Benoit Delbecq 4 - Spots On Stripes (CLEAN FEED RECORDS 2018)

« A thoughtful chill runs through the music of Benoît Delbecq, a French pianist of investigative temperament and crystalline technique. There’s a ton of compressed energy in his playing, but he projects an unflappable calm ». These lines from the New York Times in 2010 by jazz critic Nate Chinen offer a pertinent description of Delbecq’s music. Delbecq is a multi-awarded  Parisian pianist and composer, a type-setter who persists in developing his ideas among which a very rhythmic approach that brings the soul of jazz to John Cage’s prepared piano. Delbecq may prepare just a few strings with wood sticks then sit at the piano become a percussion-and-piano ensemble. Delbecq is curious with sound, the rhythm of prose, and mutating loops of sound fabrics. His musical thrust continues to weave some outstanding and compelling tapestries for our delight.

This new quartet assembles four musicians from New York and Paris of the highest caliber in today’s contemporary jazz scene. There are winding melodies written for silversmith Mark Turner who kneads them like dow when Delbecq elegantly seems to observe them from a mirror, as well as lines for John Hébert whose rocking bass may decide to shift the whole group’s harmony, the whole cooking magically with Gerald Cleaver’s stellar, soulfoul and contagious drumming. The quartet plays a nomadic and rhythmic music as if they followed a map with contour lines only, letting musical gems appear and farm them on the moment on such fertile terrain.

Delbecq was born in 1966. Since the early nineties, his works have received acclaims from legendary musicians such as Mal Waldron, Steve Lacy, György Ligeti, Steve Coleman, Evan Parker, as well as from many critics and festivals around the world. He studied improvised music in Paris with free music pioneer Alan Silva. When aged 19, he joined Silva’s Celestrial Communication Orchestra, while jazz giant Mal Waldron mentored him to work on his own musical ideas. Delbecq has participated in a couple of jazz workshops at the Banff Centre and studied there with Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, among others greats. He also studied composition and music analysis with Solange Ancona, a former student of Olivier Messiaen. For composing he uses his own graphic notation he came cross with when transcribing the music of the Aka pigmees from the Central African rainforest.

He has previously worked with Mark Turner, John Hébert and Gerald Cleaver in two different projects (Delbecq Unit with Turner in 2003-5, and Hébert trio with Cleaver on drums since 2008). He’s been an activist of the Hask Collective Paris (1992-2004) and is presently a founding member of Bureau de Son Paris (2008) and the dStream label.

Delbecq’s works include collaborations with Mark Turner, Evan Parker, Oliver Lake, Michael Moore, Jean-Jacques Avenel, John Hébert, Steve Argüelles, Gerald Cleaver, Julian Argüelles, Marc Ducret, Guillaume Orti, Noël Akchoté, Mark Helias, Fred Hersch, Andy Milne, Ethan Iverson, Kris Davis, Jozef Dumoulin, Mike Ladd, Mary Halvorson, Taylor Ho Bynum, Tomas Fujiwara, François Houle, Gerry Hemingway, Toma Gouband, Samuel Blaser, Masa Kamaguchi, Emile Biayenda, Miles Perkin, Guillaume Orti, Robin Fincker, Sylvain Darrifourcq, Robin Verheyen, Clemens Van de Feen, Tomas Fujiwara, Jonas Burwinkel, Petter Eldh, Tim Berne, Tom Rainey, Lotte Anker, Hubert Dupont, Sarah Murcia, Olivier Py, François Thuillier, Stéphane Galland, Petter Bruun, Claudia Solal, Sarah Murcia, Kim Myhr, Michele Rabbia, Maria Pia de Vito, Oene Van Geel, Mandhira de Saram, Jonas Burgwinkel, Petter Eldh, Jorrit Dijsktra, John Hollenbeck, Dave King, Grdon Gordina, Kenton Loewen and many others.

1 Spots on Stripes 8:35

2 Broken World 4:13

3 Rosemary K 3:41

4 The Loop of Chicago 5:24

5 Disparition Du Si 3:20

6 Dawn Sounds 6:51

7 Old Vinyl 5:43

8 Springs 5:28

9 Dripping Stones 4:35

10 De Stael 5:30

Mark Turner  tenor saxophone

Benoît Delbecq  piano

John Hébert  double bass

Gerald Cleaver  drums

All compositions by Benoît Delbecq (Sacem)

Recorded June 15th, 2017 at Trading8s Studio, Paramus NJ by Christopher Sulit | Mixed by Benoît Delbecq at PlushSpace Paris | Mastered by Klaus Sheuermann at 4ohm Berlin

Produced by Benoît Delbecq | Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul | Design by Travassos

Gordon Grdina / François Houle / Kenton Loewen / Benoît Delbecq - Ghost Lights (SONGLINES 2017)

SONGLINES WILL RELEASE  GHOST LIGHTS ON JUNE 9

Album Introduces New Quartet, Expanding Grdina-Houle-Loewen Trio with the Addition of Benoit Delbecq

Gordon Grdina, guitar, electronics

François Houle, clarinet, electronics, loopers

Kenton Loewen, drums & percussion

Benoît Delbecq, piano & bass station

“The threesome navigated through a wider landscape of sound with meandering lyrical passages, encircling eerie plateaus and sudden about-turns into wild abysses triggering raucous rides and accumulation of sound that went hazy and eventually dissolved…” – Henning Bolte, AllAboutJazz, (reviewing a performance of Grdina/Houle/Loewen at Jazztopad 2016)

But when they added Benoît Delbecq the music became something else again.

François Houle explains: “As Benoît and I were looking at opportunities for the duo [established in 1996], Ken Pickering [Vancouver jazz festival artistic director] suggested we merge this with the trio collective [formed in 2014, though its members have been performing in different Grdina groups since around 2004]. Knowing how Benoît’s playing fits into so many different configurations, I thought this would work nicely. I suggested he bring his bass station to augment the lower end of the quartet.” Two performances at the 2015 festival led to a return engagement in 2016 followed by a day in the studio. “The whole session unfolded quite spontaneously, with hardly any discussion between takes. Gord suggested we play my piece ‘Soro’ as he knew Benoît’s affinity for African rhythms in his piano approach. Benoît brought out “Broken World”, written shortly after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan in Paris. We tried it and found it to be a beautiful, haunting piece. The rest was completely improvised, and took us into the most unexpected musical spaces, with generous room for all to participate in the music making.” The longest take (not on the record) went on for 31 minutes!

So this is music that takes its time, as Benoît notes: “It’s music with slow motion, with nothing spectacular or demonstrative. But delicate…We let the flow of improvisation be at play and it held us in a creative mode…I think the strength comes from the collective aspect of the craft. This is why I play music – to share some states of grace with my peers; it’s an incredible feeling to experience a common way to conceive sound fabrics collectively.” François agrees: “It speaks to the really broad scope of experiences by this collective. We can move from one musical state to the next with seemingly little effort, while trusting that the others will not only anticipate the next move, but also pave the way for this to happen at any given moment.”

In music like this, texture is as important as structure, and electronics play their role in Gord’s playing, which features rich-sounding octave-doubling. François uses loopers to similar effect: “I'm interested in opening up the vertical range of the clarinet and treating it as a chordal instrument rather than a monophonic one. I consider my work with loops a sort of extension of my playing with two clarinets simultaneously.” Benoît doesn’t employ his looping software here, but his bass station has its own sensuous sine waves and filters: “It’s just a basic (two oscillators) analog synth made by Novation in the early 90s. I mostly use it in the lower register and I love the feel of it. I’ve always liked the mixture of electronics and ‘bio’ sounds such as prepared piano or regular piano…What I like in how the guys play is that we all sound like we’re processed even when we might not be using electronics, because our concern for sound production is very advanced.”

“Waraba” is dedicated to the late bassist (and kora and sanza player) Jean-Jacques Avenel, whose 2004 west African jazz release on Songlines, Waraba, Benoît produced. Benoît started working with JJ in 1998, and JJ was a member of the trio Delbecq 3 The Sixth Jump from 2008 until his death. “Anyone who played with Jean-Jacques and shared his love for African music has been deeply imprinted by JJ’s joy, expertise, and world-class musicianship…I still feel his presence when I play, and when I vamp layers on the prepared piano I could keep going forever, like Manding musicians who have another idea of time and duration in music…All of us in this band are strongly related with traditional music from all continents, and the momentum of the music we played found itself naturally.”

“Waraba” ends the record on a hopeful and almost joyous or at least somewhat peaceful note, but the music has moved though many other spaces to get there. The aesthetic is liminal: music that’s on the verge of becoming something else, crossing boundaries that are undefined and intuitive. This applies to the subtle way instruments and instrumental lines merge and separate, the range of harmony/atonality, rhythmic and energetic aspects (from near-stasis to turbulence), different emotional resonances – and finally the way the music engages the listener’s attention in a play of foreground/background, active listening and trance-like immersion.

More information on Grdina-Houle-Lowen can be found here.   Benoit Delbecq's website is delbecq.net. Read an interview with Houle and Delbecq about Ghost Lights on Songlines website.