Jean-Luc Cappozzo & Géraldine Keller - Air Prints

Eyal Hareuveni, AllAboutJazz

The collaborative art of French trumpeter Jean-Luc Cappozzo and vocal artist and flutist Géraldine Keller is a sophisticated play with air. Air breathes, gusts, atmospheric waves or windswept labyrinths and the spaces between these air bursts. Cappozzo and Keller subject the ether to their spontaneous whim, often surrender themselves to the surprising fancy of the ether.

Cappozzo — known from his intimate collaborations with fellow countrymen, bass masters Joëlle Léandre and Claude Tchamitchian, drummer Edward Perraud or American trumpeter Herb Robertson — rarely plays the trumpet as a brass instrument. Like other innovative musicians — British saxophonist John Butcher or like-minded trumpeters, German Axel Dörner or Americans Peter Evans and Nate Wooley he treats the trumpet as a metallic vehicle to transform, play and mutate his breaths, but unlike these musicians he opts for more abstract, drone-based windchasing. Keller, whose background is in contemporary music, is a playful artist who follows her intuition, leaving behind any attempt to structure form or cohesive reason for her immediate, creative soprano vocal articulations, totally immersed in the deep end of the moment.

The duo free improvised music is volatile, light and fragile and highly creative. The natural, organic blows are mixed with the blows produced with the manufactured instruments until it is hard to know their origins. These spare, open-ended airy moments, focused on reaching out to the unknown and intuitive manifestations of sound, distant from any conventional notion of idiom, are distilled into a series of uncompromising, sensitive musical communication.

Often these light interactions are so transparent, as on "Les souffles du temps," that they sound as surfacing from a dream-like state of mind. But there are also amusing, theatrical elements to it on the most busy and nervous improvisation "Volutes et spirales." Only the albums title improvisation gravitates patiently into a loose melodic theme that lightly reference a conventional jazz improvisation.

An exceptional and stubborn search for air by two remarkably creative musicians.