Recommended: Gui Duvignau – “Fissura”

Fissura is an album built on a foundation of conflict and contradiction.  The music possesses the lethal force of a live wire, yet also a hazy sonority that mutes any suggestion of aggression.  At times the music flails about dramatically, as it does on the title-track, but then there are tracks like “Haiku” and “O Bem do Mar” that reflect the inner peace of sunrise.  And this, too, is juxtaposed against the lumbering cadence of “Sisyphus,” a tune that adopts its own motion, its own tonal implications.

Bassist Gui Duvignau somehow gets them all to fit into the same stream of imagery, as if shaping dreams on the fly but with a precise choreography in mind.  This results in an appealing looseness of delivery and form, while behaving with a logic that often only becomes apparent in hindsight.  It also means that none of its edginess is sacrificed when the music enters a state of serenity.

A seriously compelling album.

Your album personnel:  Gui Duvignau (double bass, electric bass), Jonathan Orland (alto sax, clarinet), Julien Pontvianne (tenor sax, clarinet), Federico Casagrande (guitar), Thomas Caillou (guitar) and Thibault Perriard (drums).

Released on the Onze Heures Onze label.

Listen to more album tracks at the artist’s Bandcamp page.

Jazz from the São Paulo, Brazil scene.

Available at:  Bandcamp | Amazon | eMusic