Alto saxophonist Michaël Attias has thrived on the avant-garde frontier of jazz for quite a while, especially once he moved to NYC in 1994. His associations with improvised music masters runs long and deep: Paul Motian, Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Anthony Coleman and more. He’s put out a number of albums as a leader himself, but his upcoming one èchos la nuit (“echoes the night”) is a unique moment for him: it’s his first one unaccompanied.
But there’s another thing that makes this record so unique: it’s an alto sax/piano duet, too…played simultaneously by Michaël Attias, with no overdubs. Now before you dismiss that as a gimmick, check out the stream debuting above of a track from èchos la nuit, entitled “Trinité.”
There’s nothing necessarily new about a piano and sax playing together in unison and honestly, the combination of the two forms a sweet, singing sound that I wish was done more often. But since Michaël Attias is handling both ends at once, he gets to take it further by playing improvisations in unison. Though “Trinité” works off of a framework, whatever certain phrasing he dreams up in the moment on his sax is replicated in real time by his right hand on the keyboard (or vice versa). The one-mind/two-instruments approach serves the song in a way that no two people can do.
èchos la nuit is set for release on April 5, 2019 via Out Of Your Head Records.
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