The Constellative Trio is the improvising trio of French musicians Gaël Mevel and Thierry Waziniak, along with the Italian soprano saxophonist Gianni Mimmo. Although this self-titled album is their debut release as the Constellative Trio, the three have played and recorded together before, albeit in different combinations. Mimmo and Waziniak were two-thirds of a trio with pianist Yoko Miura, whose wholly improvised program was recorded in France in 2018 and subsequently released on Mimmo’s now-defunct, and certainly missed, Amirani label. Mevel and Waziniak have played together as long ago as 1996 in the Gaël Mevel Trio, the third member being the superb double bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, and then a few years later in the Gaël Mevel Quintet, which in addition to Mevel, Waziniak, and Avenel, included clarinetist Jacques Di Donato and cellist Didier Petit. For these groups Mevel played piano and composed in a rigorous style whose tonality and textures are more closely related to late Modernist composition than to jazz-derived music. In his more recent work he seems to have abandoned piano for cello, which latter instrument he plays on this recording. In addition to his work with other musicians, Mevel has also undertaken a number of duo collaborations with dancers, including Caroline Lagouge Chaussavoine and more recently, Namiko Gahier-Ogawa, with whom he improvised a piece around Japanese texts.
The music on this album was recorded in early June 2023, at La Maison en Bois in Abbeville la Riviére, during the trio’s tour of France. All of it was improvised.
The first sounds we hear are multiphonic chords broken by silences from the soprano saxophone. It is a kind of manifesto borne along on a handful of notes; Mimmo is signaling to us right away that the music will be as much about open spaces and sonorities as about melody and counterpoint. The playing on this first piece develops along minimalist lines, with Mimmo playing brief melodic fragments and Mevel centering himself on a drone tone altered through subtle changes in bowing. Waziniak’s nervous skittering adds a degree of tension that contrasts with the ruminative, longer-duration sounds from the saxophone and cello. Let the Shadow Come In maintains the introspective mood established by the first piece. Here Mimmo again plays with restraint; Waziniak’s drumming is muffled and sporadic; Mevel begins the piece pizzicato before moving to a brief unaccompanied arco solo. On Tale of the Shuffled Sheets a slightly more extroverted convergence of lines binds the cello and saxophone; the music then sets itself decisively in a jazz-inflected direction with Mevel’s pizzicato playing alluding to a free jazz double bass and Waziniak very briefly yet unmistakably threatening to break out into a swing rhythm before Mimmo and Mevel tighten the reins with several close harmonies. Scattered Newspaper is played with a greater degree of abandonment driven by Mimmo’s nimble runs up and down the instrument’s compass as well as by Waziniak’s restless work on tom-toms.
In addition to the longer improvisations, the album contains several interludes or “bagatelles,” generally shorter pieces named for colors. These interludes highlight the work of a trio that can express as much through concision as other, more prolix players, can at length.
