Artist: Francois Houle, Alexander Hawkins, Harris Eisenstadt
Album: You Have Options
Genre: Free Improvisation, Contemporary Jazz
Label: Songlines Recordings
Released: 2018
Quality: FLAC (tracks+.cue)
Tracklist:
- Clue - 5:17
- Art - 7:14
- Run Riot - 3:16
- The Pitts - 6:17
- Prayer - 6:14
- Advice - 4:18
- Largo - 5:34
- You Have Options, I Have A Lawyer - 6:43
- Le Concombre De Chicoutimi - 6:14
- Dusk - 7:19
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- Personnel:
- François Houle - clarinet
- Alexander Hawkins - piano
- Harris Eisenstadt - drums
A good example of the level of interplay here is Eisenstadt’s “You Have Options, I Have a Lawyer,” as described by Alex: “Around the 3:00 mark I start playing a syncopated discord figure in the right hand, and check out how Harris’ snare drum jumps right on it…Harris then introduces a figure on the toms at 3:40 which seems then to prod the piano right hand in turn to jump into a melodic idea. Meanwhile, François is just working away on this beautiful two-clarinet figure, sailing above all this.”
And in Houle’s “Run Riot,” the most intense and free piece on the record, François points to “a real ecstatic musical moment where everything comes into focus rhythmically, harmonically, and energetically (1:16 to 1:30). It’s moments like this (to my ears) that make the whole endeavor of improvisation worthwhile.” Alex responds: “An interesting flip side to the joy of music making together is the way people who get on and are having fun can still capture a sort of melancholy. Harris’s ‘The Pitts’ is a nice example…it’s an almost impossibly sad tune in some ways! But what I love about the performance is the total lack of sentimentality – like Monk. We play it a little bit like Michelangeli plays Chopin.”
You Have Options represents another step in Songlines’ 26-year relationship with François Houle, starting with our very first release in 1992 – his septet François Houle Et Cetera – right up to last year’s Ghost Lights collective, and including three duo records with French pianist Benoît Delbecq and one with Norwegian pianist Håvard Wiik – projects which also owe their existence in various ways to Ken Pickering. There’s been a shorter but equally important relationship with Harris Eisenstadt, from Canada Day II in 2011 to Recent Developments in 2017. Houle Hawkins Eisenstadt are eager to take things further; as François says: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, regardless of geography. I’d like to think that there is lots of room and willingness on this planet to listen to this kind of musicmaking.”