Sylvie Courvoisier: Chimaera

The Swiss-born, Brooklyn-based Sylvie Courvoisier — whom The New York Times has called “a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise”— has earned just renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the downtown jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades. Courvoisier will lead the septet edition of her atmospheric, shape-shifting new ensemble Chimaera, showcasing sounds that Jazzwise magazine says are “full of dream-like ambience and luminous textures.” This special event will feature Courvoisier alongside the iconic Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet, Ikue Mori on electronics, Nate Wooley on trumpet, Drew Gress on double- bass and a pair of percussionists: Nasheet Waits on drums and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibraphone. The band will be playing music from the widely acclaimed double-disc Chimaera album, released in October 2023 on Intakt.

For the music of Chimaera — initially commissioned by the Sons d’hiver festival in Paris — Courvoisier was inspired by the Symbolist paintings of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a French artist whose fantastical, hallucinatory work aimed to place “the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.” Redon’s otherworldly images marked him as a precursor to the Surrealists; moreover, he likened these enigmatic pictures to music, in that they evoked “the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.” The lucid-dream sounds of Courvoisier’s Chimaera album stay true to this impulse, floating and elusive like shadows on the ocean; in concert, the pianist’s group will bring her compositions alive in the moment, expansive and subtly different from night to night — the melodic glint of trumpets, piano and vibraphone atop a rolling groove of rhythmic ambience, with Ikue’s magic clouds of sounds enveloping the band.