"In 2022, Eddie Prévost celebrated his 80 th birthday with the series Towards a Bright Nowhere, a series of July concerts at Café Oto that appeared as both a series of four CDs and a documentary. These two CDs document later duo performances from October 2022 to June 2023 with French pianist Marjolaine Charbin, apparently a recent association, and saxophonist John Butcher, a longtime creative partner. Each emphasizes a different dimension of Prévost’s creativity. He’s credited with percussion on the CD with Charbin, which in his case means a bass drum placed flat on the floor and employed as resonator for a variety of small objects and instruments as well as an assortment of cymbals and objects that are not struck but are bowed, creating sustained tones. With Butcher, he’s seated at a conventional drum kit, stretching the drumming practices of modern jazz and free jazz in an otherworldly performance. 

These two afternoon duos from Café Oto reveal a remarkably empathetic partnership, each a single long improvisation, the first from October 2022 running to 30 minutes, the second from January 2023 to 47. Each is a profound dialogue moving freely and meaningfully through a variety of textures. Charbin has a host of approaches to the piano, from prepared piano to extended series of clusters in regular rhythm. If percussion suggests isolated complex sounds, the two find tremendous variety applying compound methodologies. The metallic wails of bowed and scraped cymbals and assorted string techniques applied to the piano harp create passages of evocative long tones, those “cries of a dove” a legitimate description of this music, the cries extending to the material world itself.

There are moments in this music that frustrate attribution, like a passage of continuous bass rumbling that might be the product of bass drum or piano but which doesn’t quite precisely surrender its mode of production. Prévost’s work is at once contemplative and moving, in many senses, as well; as is always the case with his music, it is a mode of philosophical action. This is an excellent introduction to Marjolaine Charbin, a pianist likely to become a significant presence in improvised music." - The Free Jazz Collective