ALAIN METRAILLER “Heights Prospection”

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ARTIST

Alain Metrailler

ALBUM TITLE

“Heights Prospection”

LABEL

Unit Records

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Another debut album, in a period particularly rich in exciting new releases, comes from 30-year-old Swiss saxophonist Alain Métrailler, who has long been based in New York. There, he has built on his classical training while completing a distinctly jazz-oriented artistic journey. Métrailler can count Joe Lovano, Reggie Workman and Ohad Talmor among his formative influences, and has also succeeded in assembling this formidable quartet, with whom his music was extensively honed in live performance before finally being committed to record.

The result is the clear affirmation of an already astonishingly mature artistic vision, allowing Métrailler to maintain perfect control over the bridge he has built between a European-inflected aesthetic and a fully realised, highly relevant jazz expressiveness of distinctly New York character. What is particularly striking from the very first listen is his remarkable formal awareness, which manages to balance a pronounced melodic sensibility with a sense of “urban” unease. The latter term may perhaps have fallen somewhat out of use, but we employ it here to describe Métrailler’s ability to complete a Bildung that is anything but academic: rather, it is the fruit of lived experience inseparable from place, understood as physical space but also as human and inner space. Indeed, the title refers directly to Prospect Heights, the Brooklyn neighbourhood where the saxophonist lived and played while developing the project.

The group’s architecture is delicate and built on meticulously crafted subtleties, an almost clockwork mechanism that is constantly and dynamically modulated. Lyricism and melodic cells dissolve and intermingle while retaining their expressive weight, within an approach based on continuous exchanges and negotiations of an ever-changing musical configuration. Here, Métrailler’s finesse as a composer and his abilities as a leader become fully apparent in his choice of musicians of such exceptional calibre: masters of interaction capable of generating precisely that sense of unease mentioned earlier – the magnificent Stemeseder – or those subtle shifts that fuel the music’s propulsion, as in the case of Tordini and the no less extraordinary McPherson.

The restrained refinement of the musical material does not lend itself to displays of impetuosity, but instead constructs its own space through a carefully conceived alternation of fullness and emptiness, sound and silence. “Crazy He Calls Me”, the saxophone-and-piano duet that closes the album and is dedicated to Lee Konitz, by no means epitomises the album as a whole, but we offer it as an example of an aesthetic of “subtraction” that Métrailler has fully mastered and that remains an essential part of his style.

The breadth and spirit of this precious collective music make the album essential listening: it may well captivate and surprise.

Sandro Cerini

DISTRIBUTED BY

unitrecords.com
alainmetrailler.bandcamp.com

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