Benoit Delbecq: The Weight of Light

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Benoit Delbecq (p)

Label:

Pyroclastic Records

March/2021

Media Format:

CD

Catalogue Number:

PR13

RecordDate:

Rec. 12-13 March 2020

Benoit Delbecq possesses an impressively long discography as befits a highly respected pianist on the French improv scene. Before deciding to become a professional pianist he was a member of Alan Silva's ICAP, a jazz and improvised music school, while studying both sound and engineering studies that lead to becoming an assistant director for films and an assistant in sound engineering. After attending the Banff Centre Jazz Workshop in 1987 he decided to opt for a less challenging division of labour by pursuing his vocation as a jazz improviser/composer. His physicist brother's PhD thesis demonstrated light has a mass, so with a little poetic licence he changed ‘mass’ to ‘weight’ for the purposes of these nine solo piano ruminations, often with prepared piano, which contemplate ‘brightness and ethereal darkness’ and how ‘hanging mobiles wield influence over his relationship with music’.

Whether or not such subjective reflections on the composer/performer's intentions yield insight into his performances remains moot; the fragmented, angular and often uncomfortable trajectory of Delbecq's improvisations might not have the charm to soothe the savage beast or evoke the harmony of the spheres, but nevertheless evokes a sort of virtuous boredom unique to music you respect but are unable to love.

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