all sorts of jazz, improv or else - hot off the press

During the 2020’s lockdowns, an idea came to mind:
Since it is currently impossible to play THERE, let’s make some music HERE!
HERE, the sea is very close; the river is subject to the fluctuations of the tide, the light is constantly changing, the reflections vary infinitely on the uncovered or submerged mud, the seasons illuminate this little corner of land and water differently: everything is moving, everything HERE is about cycles nested in each other, in crossed and concentric rhythms.
The time, the light, the tide, the season: it is the landscape that imposes its rhythm, its reflections, its silences on the music.
(from Marc Ducret's liner notes)

This suite of six songs premiered in Cologne, December 2016, three years before Steve Dalachinsky passed away. His widow, Yuko Otomo, wrote the liner notes for this release.
Steve and Scott met at a festival in New York where Steve was serving as MC. He was rummaging through the merch table and had an Elliott Sharp solo CD in his hand. Scott pointed to a stack of Sharp-Fields CDs and told him that Sharp was great alone but with Fields magic was made. Not until 45 minutes later, when Steve stepped up to introduce the band, did he realize that the stranger flogging Sharp-Fields recordings was Scott.
Steve was either forgiving or forgetful. Several years later when Scott wrote to ask for permission to set his poetry, he agreed readily without mentioning the prank. Scott told Steve that his intention was to distinguish this music from the performances for which he was known: spoken word over free jazz, often completely improvised. Scott thought that Steve had that genre nailed down. Steve sent dozens of poems and left it to him to choose. Steve couldn’t attend the premiere but he did see a video compilation of the performance.

A more than original project for drummer and percussionist Didier Lasserre, better known as an improviser (having participated in numerous recordings, mainly in small forms, from solos and duets to quartets), Silence was pleased is his first composed work.
To interpret it, the musician has chosen no less than seven partners to respond to the constant search that drives him, that of a "fair relationship between sound and silence". To go towards what he heard, he had to "find a path", note with precise indications the key points – entrances, exits, superpositions –, melodic profiles, with an important part still being left to improvisation.
From the selected septet, we therefore witness the appearance of sub-groups, often duets, sometimes a trio, and once for the finale, a quartet which fleetingly harbors the ghost of a sextet. In the end, a high quality musical melting pot carrying a lot of emotions, but also a lot of intimate daydreams, even post-baroque.

Behind the nickname "Lila Bazooka" stand Sophie Bernado and Céline Grangey, two artists in search of new frontiers to overcome. With Arashiyama, they combine jazz and a certain form of classicism, both in love with free experimentation and bubbling sounds. Difficult to classify, the universe of the duo roams the Japanese lands, a society torn between tradition and modernity, where they first found their inspiration while travelling there. Sophisticated and 'carnal', the breath serves as the backbone of this first album with vaporous and meditative contours, erecting a world crossed by a thousand lights and neat poetry, freedom and subtlety, by movements and displacements, softness and energy.