Louis Sclavis Quintet

Rouge is the first ECM album by the French clarinettist and saxophonist Louis Sclavis, recorded in 1991 and released in 1992. His quintet works at the meeting point of jazz and chamber music, with written pieces that twist and turn and leave room for sharp improvising. With violinist Dominique Pifarély beside him at the front, the record made him one of the most original voices on the European improvising scene.

Sclavis, born in Lyon in 1953, came out of the Workshop de Lyon and the ARFI collective, built around the idea of an "imaginary folklore". By 1991 he had led his own groups for several years and had received the Prix Django Reinhardt in 1988. Here he plays clarinets and soprano saxophone, with Pifarély on violin, François Raulin on piano and synthesizer, Bruno Chevillon on bass and Christian Ville on drums. The album was recorded in September 1991 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The writing is shared. Sclavis wrote most of the pieces, Raulin contributed three and Pifarély one, and the short opener One is credited to both Sclavis and Pifarély. The longest track, Face Nord, runs over ten minutes and moves through clearly separate sections, more like a film sequence than a head and solos. Les bouteilles sets clarinet and violin over Ville's drums and a pulsing synthesizer sequence from Raulin. Raulin's Kali la nuit opens onto a wide, open space, and in his Reeves the repeated figures come close to minimalism, and Pifarély's amplified violin cuts across the ensemble throughout the album.

The record opened a long relationship with the label, and Sclavis went on to make many ECM albums, among them Acoustic Quartet (1994) with Pifarély and Chevillon. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2012, Tyran Grillo called it "the magical label debut" and heard the quintet as one organically connected unit. When Jazzwise revisited the album in 2019, Robert Shore singled out Les bouteilles for the way Ville's drumming and Raulin's synthesizer drive it.

This is the cassette edition of ECM 1458, first released in 1992.