(Chamber Jazz, Improvised Music) [CD] Chamber 4 (Marcelo dos Reis, Luís Vicente, Théo Ceccaldi, Valentin Ceccaldi) - City of Light - 2017, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

LUÍS VICENTE . trumpet
THÉO CECCALDI . violin and voice
VALENTIN CECCALDI . cello and voice
MARCELO DOS REIS . acoustic guitar, prepared guitar and voice

Chamber 4 – City of Light (Clean Feed Records, 2017) ****1/2
By Rick Joines
City of Light is the second album by French brothers Théo Ceccaldi (violin and voice) and Valentin Ceccaldi (cello and voice) with the Portuguese musicians Luís Vicente (trumpet) and Marcelo dos Reis (acoustic and prepared guitars, and voice). Recorded live on April 28th, 2016, at Les Soirées Tricot Festival in Paris, City of Light is fifty minutes of improvised chamber music. Clean Feed Records proclaims there were “no scores, no structures of any kind, no previous discussions about what to do or not to do or any type of conceptual reasoning,” yet the three movements impress as if they were a single impassioned composer’s carefully-constructed thoughts concentrated and immortalized in a written score. Each musician effortlessly nourishes an intimate exchange of tonal and rhythmic ideas and subtle alterations. Their first album together, in 2015, was praised as “most beautiful” by Stef Gijssels. This one is, I think, even more beautiful.
What if Paris—the City of Light—were translated into music? Its shifting moods—from dawn to dusk—given voice, and with all the hurly-burly in between? And how would it sound as it settles down for the night, and when it dreams? It may be foolish to imagine a narrative for the three improvised movements of City of Light, but the reference to Paris might allow an impressionistic one.
“Part 1” begins quietly, with the brothers Ceccaldi bowing broad strokes on violin and cello as if the city is waking at sunrise. Reis ping-pongs harmonics, keeping a lulling sort of 4/4 time, and lingers on a diffident finger-picked chord. Vicente probably horrifies his music teachers: he enters with some deftly-controlled “bad” embouchure—rushing air and smearing and shredding some nearly toneless rips. His polyphonic partly-valved dissonant tone clusters are choked, pinched, and constricted until he opens up with some plunger-mute vocalizing and fluttering glissandi. Half way into the first part, everyone plays with an ecstatic enthusiasm—if you want see some chamber music headbanging, watch the video. Reis strums flamenco style and finger picks out of regular time. The guitar and cello become drum kits and beat out a tribal rhythm. There is a low, lone voice, saying “Oooooh.” The Ceccaldis’ weave through each other’s arco until they drop out, leaving Vicente and Reis to finish in counterpoint.
“Part 2” begins as if the raucous city was already running full tilt. Everyone plays fortissimo and at once—strumming, drumming, blowing, the strings cutting jagged whorls. Four minutes into this metropolitan effusion, the quartet slows. Vincente puffs for air, inserts a mute. The cello and violin stretch low draping hammocks of sound. Reis interrupts their siesta, scraping and slapping his guitar like bongos, then he stomps a tube screamer pedal and heads into overdrive. At this point, I feel I should provide a spoiler alert—unusual things are about to happen; frightening things. Yet even if I ruin the surprise, you’re still going to jump out of your shorts when you hear it. A voice rises above the floor of sound singing an easy “ahhh” that grows louder, then quieter, then becomes an undulating “woooing” ululation. Almost involuntarily, the players begin to harmonize with this human voice—it orders their reactions. They skitter around it and instinctively accompany it. As the volume of each increases, there comes an unpredictable series of four absolutely blood-curdling screams. Each one is harrowing every time. Then all three on stringed instruments are singing vibrato oooos and shaping other terrifying growls with beastly transformations of their jaws and lips. If there really was no pre-planning before the playing began, I wonder if the berserker screaming scared the other three as effectively as he unsettles the audience. Following that maniacal vocal section, Théo Ceccaldi saws away on the violin as if leading a barn dance; Reis strums and flicks a tango, then pedals a wah-wah. Vicente wah-wahs back with a plunger mute. The cello turns drum, and Reis winds it all down, plinking on the bridge.
The business of the City of Light slows down in “Part 3.” The Ceccaldis gently sway; Vincente with a plunger mute echoes some shimmering phantasms of Dixieland; Reis resists the dying of the light with flamenco flourishes before drubbing away on a prepared acoustic guitar. For a while the quartet seems to play at cross purposes—as if there is a profuse confusion of unresolved thoughts as dusk falls. For a moment, they all seem to find the tonic, and by the end, the playing of each is sparse and snoozy as if fading into dreams.
In Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the speaker and pale Ramon Fernandez walk the beach listening to the crashing waves of the ocean and the singing of a woman, who also walks there. Her song—that human art—seems to accompany and translate nature, giving order and meaning to the incoherent “constant cry . . . of the veritable ocean,” which is “sound alone.” The speaker marvels at the woman’s ability to translate eternal, inhuman chaos, to harmonize with it to reveal order where there was only chaos. As we listen to Chamber 4’s City of Light, we, too, can muse about their mediation between us and the city’s pandemonium. Experience overwhelms us. Perhaps it only makes sense when shaped by human art. The effect of artfully-achieved music persists, even after the notes have faded, “arranging, deepening, enchanting night.” Chamber 4’s improvisations may provide only a fleeting sense of order to the hullabaloo of the City of Light, but like the singer on the beach in Key West, what they played is what they heard, and through them, this cannot help be anything besides beautiful.
Video for much of “City of Light, Pt. 1” can be viewed here:

In Paris, in the City of Light, when the sky turns into darkness, you see a flock of birds, a murmuration of starlings, dancing together across the vast expanse of the universe above you. They move together with absolute unpredictability, but slowly. Then you hear their sound. A trumpet. A cello. A guitar. A violin. You hear four instruments. And they move as one. In all directions. Slow now. At superspeed next. Crazy. Impossible. Beautiful. Unpredictable. Chaotic. Ordered. You don’t see them anymore. You just hear them. Moving, relentlessly, maddeningly. A musical flock of starlings. Doing their dance. Out of joy. Out of fear. Out of distress. Nobody knows what moves them, you just hear their arabesques of sound, twirling around in the sky.
They move as one. They move as one with distinct voices. Yet they move forward, tightly, propulsed with a common sense of purpose, driven by a common emotional power, a collective manifestation of shared and shifting sentiments. It is all about dynamics. About intensity, focus and openness.
In physics there is a concept of ‘critical systems’, systems that are on the absolute edge between order and chaos, balancing between extreme opportunities and collapse. Systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation, all the different elements making up the system moving as one, as if linked by an unknown knowledge. You see this too in the murmuration of starlings. The starlings do not follow a leader. If they did, they would move in the same direction and with order, but no, they move without a leader, but as a single system, with a collective response to one element that might change, creating their mesmerising dance of total unpredictability and beauty, coherent and frivolous, evolving into forms you have never seen before, never heard before. Their most surprising and exotic feature is their near-instantaneous signal-processing speed, a factor which remains a mystery. This is what you get here.
Something unusual, something unique, a wonderful dance of shifting emotions and aesthetic beauty, expanding and contracting, moving to the left and to the right, full of energy, sometimes contained, sometimes unleashed, sounds shifts and change, moods shift and change, and move steadily forward, propelled by the other instruments into a relentless cadence, by the repetitive phrases on the guitar, the long stretched notes of the trumpet, and the lyrical lines of the cello, the explorative escape by the violin, not too far, taking a different angle, only subtly and it is followed by the trumpet, weaving forward, changing roles, but all moving together, finding deep in themselves the same emotions to drive the music forward, which can be quiet contemplation, or raging frenzy and distress or quiet pain and despair or sentiments as yet unnamed, always intense and raw and fragile. Shimmering. Radiating energy and human warmth.
You watch the night sky. You hear the sounds in their wonderful dance. The mystery and beauty of it.