Tracé Provisoire brings the French violinist Dominique Pifarély back to ECM, after his solo album Time Before and Time After, with a quartet founded in spring 2014. Pifarély works in the unstable ground between composition and improvisation. His pieces set out ideas, structures and themes, the provisional traces of the title, and the group develops them in the moment into textural, lyrical or abstract playing. It is chamber music with the energy of a working jazz band.
Two of the musicians go back a long way with him. Bassist Bruno Chevillon played with Pifarély in Louis Sclavis's groups and on their ECM album Acoustic Quartet, and drummer François Merville joined them in the Dans la nuit project. Pianist Antonin Rayon, better known as a Hammond organist, makes his first ECM appearance here. The album was recorded in July 2015 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, engineered by Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The programme is built partly of pairs. Le peuple effacé opens spaciously, with Pifarély's bow trembling "like the feeler of an insect", as ECM Reviews put it. Its second part settles into a slower, ornamented meditation. The first part of the title piece finds a firmer groove, while the second belongs largely to Rayon. Le regard de Lenz, whose title Klaus Nüchtern of Falter linked to the nervous gaze of Georg Büchner's Lenz, is the album's most tightly coiled piece. At thirteen and a half minutes, Tout a déjà commencé is the longest, with Chevillon's bass well to the fore.
In The Guardian in 2016, John Fordham wrote that "everything a Pifarély band plays sounds as if it has a rich and reflective old and new music history to it". He singled out the closing Vague (Part 2), a slow lament turned into ghostly violin meditation over precise bass and drums. In the Berlin Tagesspiegel, Gregor Dotzauer stressed the close understanding between violin and double bass, and praised Rayon's mix of subtle abstraction and force.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2481, first released on 3 June 2016.
