Sylvie Courvoisier - Chimaera / 2CD set

Chimaera is the newest ensemble of pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier. The virtuoso band brings together key musical personalities from the New York jazz scene in Wadada Leo Smith, Nate Wooley, Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen, and features Austrian artist Christian Fennesz, whose ambient textures can be considered Chimaera’s wildcard.

Inspired by the fantastic, enigmatic-hallucinatory paintings of symbolist Odilon Redons, the sextet creates an expansive and shimmering soundscape. “The lucid, dreamlike sounds of Courvoisier’s Chimaera album are floating and elusive like shadows on the ocean; the melodic glitter of trumpet, piano and vibraphone on a rolling groove of rhythmic ambience, with Fennesz’s magical guitar clouds enveloping the band,” writes Bradley Bamberger of the music of this new sextet. Another high point in the musical career of Sylvie Courvoisier, about whom jazz journalist Kevin Whitehead said, “Some pianists approach their instrument as if it were a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier sometimes treats it like a playground.”