Few bassists achieve great drama, but Joëlle Léandre does it consistently in her solo performances. It comes with her combined facility with the bow and pizzicato, and with an adroit use of modes, drones, and percussive attacks that summon the expressive power of a flamenco guitarist and string traditions that long ago spread from the Middle East across North Africa to Europe. Setting out on her voyage into the mysteries of the double bass at age nine while standing on a chair, Léandre stretched the instrument’s supposed limitations, eventually collaborating with composers Giacinto Scelsi and John Cage as well as a host of distinguished improvisers, and developing the solo language heard on her new DVD, which combines multiple string and vocal techniques.
For Duende (Passion), director and poet Christian Pouget filmed Léandre in a series of dramatic outdoor and indoor settings. In Yggdrasil, she bows ferociously in primeval forests where ancient trees loom as spirits and the bass becomes their voice; in tiny rooms, like an ancient pilgrim church, the bass becomes oracular. On Blues Roots, Léandre calls up emotion on a scale immediately reminiscent of the late Charles Mingus, simultaneously plucking, bowing, and muttering in a kind of universal blues.
Filmed in a mine that has turned countryside into industrial wasteland, Khaos is a moving visual evocation of music’s power to raise spirits, both ancient and contemporary.
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.