(Avant-Garde Jazz, Free Improvisation) Michel Lambert (with Barre Phillips, Milcho Leviev, Lionel Garcin, John Gianelli) - Out Twice // 11 Improvisations + 11 Drawings - 2003, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

In more ways than one, this is a singular release. First off, and as intimated in its title, this disc is the result of two recording sessions cut in very different parts of the globe, one being Los Angeles, the other the South of France. In both cases, the common denominator is drummer Michel Lambert, a native of Quebec City now residing in Montreal after several years spent on the Toronto jazz scene. For the first date, he is joined by pianist Milcho Leviev (best known for his sideman duties with Art Pepper in the late seventies) and bassist John Gianelli; in the second one, he teams up with improv bassist par excellence Barre Phillips and saxophonist Lionel Garcin (tenor and alto I believe, though it's not always easy to be certain of this given his marked preference for delving into the pure sonics of his horns than the 'legit' notes). But the most unusual twist here is that all the cuts (five performed by the Statetside unit, the remaining six by its Euro counterpart) are basically free improvisations derived from graphic scores; in four of them there are musical notations included (one being a series of chords written out on staves), the others comprised of various lines, colors, forms and written instructions. The fact that the pictograms are spread out over three panels of the booklet, with added explanations given on the reverse side, all of which can also be accessed via the label's Website (www.482music/outtwice). Yet, for all of this info, the materials really don't provide much bearing for the listener. Indeed, there is an overarching sense of informality to the music, or at least a spontaneity that obscures any clear compositional designs. In fact, had there been no guidelines whatsover, or had they mixed these structured improvs with totally free ones (as is the case of track three, 'tir? au sort', where the drummer in fact made the score up afterwards), I doubt that the results would be vastly different.
What it is of greater interest is the way one goes about listening to this disc; of course, one could proceed in order (and tracks of one group alternate with those of the other), but by sequencing all of one together and then those of the other, one gets a very different perspective of the whole. On the one hand, a piano-bass-drum format is about as typical a jazz combo as one can get, and with a player as readily associated with the mainstream as Leviev, it would be hard not to expect this group to head that way; in their pieces, you feel them constantly flirting with it, but everyone seems so self-conscious about it that they don't want to yield to it, and Lambert, for one, stops playing repeatedly, in effect backing off from setting a tempo or establishing a pulse at very least. On the other hand, the French trio opts for a much more abstract group interplay, in particular the saxophonist who seems very much in line with a current crop of sonic-oriented reedman like Mats Gustafson, Michel Doneda or Bertrand Denzler. But they too hit a jazzy groove in the last minute or so of the ten-minute plus track "Vitrail pour Herbie" (dedicated to the late Canadian trumpeter Spanier), as if they were saying, "What the heck, let's indulge in this for a moment." All in all, this side may not be one that will jump at you, but it still invites the listener to consider it from different vantage points, which is not a bad thing at all (Marc Chenard)