Time Before and Time After is a solo violin recital by Dominique Pifarély, recorded in concert and improvised throughout, apart from one standard. It was his first album on ECM in about a decade, after Re: Pasolini with Stefano Battaglia. Its title comes from T.S. Eliot's poem Burnt Norton, and nearly every piece is dedicated to a poet.
In the 1990s Pifarély co-led a quartet with Louis Sclavis and recorded in duo with François Couturier. He has worked for three decades mainly in European jazz with a close ear on new music. The music here comes from concerts at the Auditorium Saint-Germain in Poitiers in 2012 and at the Cave Dimière in Argenteuil in February 2013. Gérard de Haro was the engineer and Manfred Eicher produced the album. Pifarély has called solo playing "a very personal workshop" in which each piece is invented or discovered in real time. He thinks of the violin as a small orchestra, with Bach's polyphony in mind.
The dedications go to Mahmoud Darwish, Fernando Pessoa, André du Bouchet, Henri Michaux, Jacques Dupin, Paul Celan, Juan Gelman and Bernard Noël. Pifarély linked each piece to a poet only after the recordings were made. Sur terre, for Darwish, opens the set with a Near Eastern colour. Gegenlicht, for Celan, is the longest piece at eleven minutes and gives the widest view of his technique. Avant le regard and L'oubli turn to the pale sound of the bow near the bridge. The recital ends with a free reading of Victor Young and Ned Washington's My Foolish Heart, which he includes to assert the violin's independence from piano, guitar or bass.
Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews heard in Sur terre a music where "every color and texture is like the seed of a new community". He singled out Gegenlicht for its technical and artistic range. Writing in the NZZ, Adam Olschewski noted that the album draws on both sides of Pifarély's work, jazz of a European kind and new music. He described the pieces as stories from many lands, charged with emotion to the brim.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2411, first released on 28 August 2015.
