Asian Fields Variations is the first recording by the trio of clarinettist Louis Sclavis, violinist Dominique Pifarély and cellist Vincent Courtois. Sclavis started the project but wanted a real collective, so each member wrote for the programme. The result is chamber music for three wooden voices, poised between written pages and composition in the moment, and rooted in long shared experience.
That history goes back a long way. Sclavis met Pifarély in Didier Levallet's group and invited him onto his 1987 album Chine. Courtois joined Sclavis's band for L'affrontement des prétendants in 1999, and all three played on Dans la nuit, Sclavis's music for a Charles Vanel silent film, issued by ECM in 2000. The trio was relaunched in March 2015 at the A Vaulx Jazz festival. They recorded in September 2016 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
Sclavis's three-part Mont Myon opens the album, with drones that turn into melody and back again. Three short solo pieces follow, one for each player: Courtois's Done and Done for cello, Sclavis's Pensée furtive on bass clarinet and Pifarély's Figure absente for violin. The title track starts from a simple dance-like figure that grows more complex in rhythm, with a pizzicato solo by Courtois. The collective improvisation Digression sits at the centre of the sequence. In the second half, Courtois's Fifteen Weeks seems to pass its melody on to Pifarély's Sous le masque, while Cèdre gives all three a virtuoso turn before La Carrière closes the set.
Reviewers heard a group of equals. John Kelman of All About Jazz noted that Sclavis's five pieces fill 28 of the 47 minutes, yet called the record "a milestone in the clarinetist's discography for ECM". In Le Monde, Francis Marmande described it as chamber music that only jazz musicians could play, at that point of hesitation between the written and the improvised. Brian Marley wrote in London Jazz News in 2017 that its continuity makes the album hard to sample and best heard whole.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2504, first released on 17 March 2017.
