Joelle Leandre and William Parker
Contrabasses
Live at Dunois
Anthony Braxton and Joelle Leandre
Joelle Leandre Project
Duo (all albums by Leo)

SHE is one of the great virtuoso bassists of the jazz world, and one of the freest too in both her spirit and musicianship.

Joelle Leandre was born in Aix-La-Provence in 1951. At the age of nine she began to learn piano and double bass, and went on to study at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1976 she gained a scholarship to the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts in Buffalo, and this enabled her to know well the contemporary New York jazz scene.

Back in Europe she was much influenced by the free Sheffield guitarist Derek Bailey, and some of her first records, from 1981 onwards, were made with British musicians, such as Instant Replay (1982) with the busking saxophonist Lol Coxhill, and her fifth album, recorded with Bailey and saxophonist Evan Parker in the same year.

In 1983, after playing with the Feminist Improvising Group, she co-founded the European Women’s Improvising Group and Les Diaboliques with Irene Schweizer and Maggie Nicols.

In 1997 she made one of her most powerful albums, Contrabasses, with the nonpareil of the free bass, the Bronx-born (in 1952) master William Parker: 56 minutes of duo and solo basses, recording live at a theatre in Ivry sur Seine.

If you ever thought that such a colloquy of the deep and the caverous would be unexciting, this album will transform your sonic consciousness. In Duet One, for example, as the aural range of these two musicians — woman/man, black/white, American/European — and their array of sounds rise up and tumble down from the startlingly high to the profoundly lower than low, there are passages of astonishing notes and cadences and the twosome seem to be playing but one myriad-stringed instrument as they climb and fall, pluck and stroke with fingers and bows and create such unexpectedness of sound that the unsuspecting listener’s attention is captive, riveted and liberated simultaneously.

The solo tracks — W.P.Solo and J.L.Solo — are as brilliantly complex as if the two musicians were still duetting, making percussions of their strings as they explore the very centre and vital edges of their acoustic worlds.

In 1999 The Joelle Leandre Project — comprising the Philadelphia-born pianist Marilyn Crispell and Aachen-born Paul Lovens on drums with the New Yorker Richard Teitelbaum handling keyboards and electronics, and the violinist from Lisbon, Carlos Zingazo — recorded a live album of compelling, but very different sounds.

The nine compositions are by Crispell, whose notes radiate a spectral, mysterious quality, with Leandre’s subterranean strings and Lovens’s ever-tapping and booming universe of percussion deluding the listener that his drums are everywhere, with all sides of Leandre’s extraterrestrial bass and Teitelbaum’s electricity of timbre. It is a record of unheard sounds, now filling the ears with all kinds of perturbation through which Crispell’s piano rocks and sways. When she duets with Leandre, as on the fifth unnamed track, you sense two remarkable musical sisters at work.

In March 2007, at the Heidelberg Caffe, Loppem, Belgium, Leandre recorded a duo double album with the saxophonist Anthony Braxton, a musical pathfinder born in Chicago in 1945. Braxton plays soprano and alto saxophones and contra-bass clarinet and his whirling, curlicuing phrases and serpentine speed of diction hovers over Leandre’s throbbing, grounded sounds and mesmeric chanting as if a giant insect were flying above the earth, exploring new habitats. Here is 90 minutes of compelling and utterly original musicianship.

Lastly, it is back to Leandre and Parker and the full, unified glory of the world of the bass, twice-over. Live at Dunois catches their performance at the January 2009 Sons D’Hiver Festival and the sense of formidable and beautiful amalgam is at its apex. You wonder if it would ever be possible to separate these sounds, which ring out in all their deep, deep profundity as a praisesong to the sheer unleashed artistry and humanity of these two extraordinary musicians. Lucky were the listeners who heard them, so alive and with all their creative joy and skill on a French winter night, with all the fire of their brilliance to warm them.