Benjamin Moussay

Promontoire is the first solo album, and the first album as a leader for ECM, by the French pianist Benjamin Moussay. Twelve short pieces, all his own, move freely between written material and improvisation, so that the line between the two is hard to locate. It is a reflective, lyrical record that sits well in the label's long run of solo piano albums. On ECM, his playing had until then been heard only inside another leader's band.

Moussay came to the label as a member of Louis Sclavis's groups, playing on Sources, Salt and Silk Melodies and Characters on a Wall. Outside ECM he had worked with Michel Portal and the drummer Éric Échampard, among others. The title comes from a small rocky summit above a lake in the Vosges, in eastern France, a high place that gives a clear view of the land around it. Manfred Eicher produced the album at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro as engineer. ECM gives January 2019 as the recording date, while the CD notes list sessions in January and August of that year.

Many of these pieces began as fuller compositions and were pared down over time, in solo concerts, to a melody and a handful of chords. None lasts much more than four minutes, and the shortest is barely a minute and a half. In The Guardian, John Lewis heard the very fast Don't Look Down as close to Conlon Nancarrow, and found Bartók's sharper piano suites behind L'Oiseau d'Or and Chasseur de Plumes. Elsewhere, Lewis noted, the default is a Satie-like introspection: minor-key ballads with quizzical chord changes. Hans-Jürgen Linke, in the Frankfurter Rundschau, heard the twelve pieces as a carefully ordered suite of miniatures rather than a loose collection.

Lewis described the set as free improvisations "that often sound like perfectly plotted miniatures". Mike Gates of UK Vibe wrote that Moussay has "that rare gift of time and space within his music". French and German critics went further: Francis Marmande in Le Monde called it an exceptional collection, and Jazzthetik gave it five stars out of five.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2659, first released on 29 May 2020.