Few musicians possess the spontaneity and sheer presence of French bassist Joëlle Léandre and English vocalist Phil Minton. Here the two senior masters meet on a Paris stage in October 2016, delivering a three-part concert Si, lence/ Is/ blu, ish. Léandre is a master of finding fresh dimensions and new voices in her instrument, and it’s a joy to hear her matched with the world’s most unpredictable vocalist.
Minton’s sheer weirdness declares itself in the first instant with a melody that is at once multiphonic and choked, set against a line of alternately pizzicato and arco bass. Minton creates his own sound world, at times spraying language that might be heard in a dream, always at the edge of comprehension. Sometimes words arise in a comic whirlwind, his “song” a living cut-up of voices from Donald Duck to Tom Waits. One outburst here suggests Jerry Lewis imitating another late Louis—Armstrong—in a festival of gargling, coughing, and anaesthetized scat singing, high-speed gibberish pitched between cartoon and a nightmare of history.
Léandre is an ideal partner in this, whether she’s picking up on and feeding a certain flamenco echo or spreading a broad orchestral canvas, a noble, timeless, surging musical architecture. It’s all superbly directed, providing a formal grandeur at once transient and eternal, a sonic theatre in which Minton soars. He sometimes whistles, and there are several moments when Léandre sings as well, the two amplifying an empathy that is everywhere implicit.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.