Leila Olivesi Quartet (featuring David Binney)
Utopia (Jazz and People JPCD 815002)

IT’S not customary for a jazz musician to record an album directly inspired by a 17th-century philosopher. Freethinking author and polemicist, but Leila Olivesi’s Utopia is just that.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) the philosopher, was not the character created in the late 19th century play by Edmond Rostand, but the writer of the posthumously published The States and Empires of the Moon and The States and Empires of the Sun, jointly titled The Other World. I don’t know whether Sun Ra of Birmingham, Alabama, the first iconoc jazz space traveller and man of Saturn, ever read de Bergerac’s works, but with his Arkestra he imagined a soundscape in the stars, a universe which Olivesi forms and creates in an entirely contrary way with this album.

Olivesi, of French and Mauretanian roots, is a pianist with the lightest and most tender of keyboard touches, and her record radiates an unusual and quiescent beauty. The benign lyrics of her song Sunland (she sings on two of the eight bracks of Utopia) hint at the creative sources of her music: “Dew drops fall/Flowers blossom looking at the sun,/In the morning daze/I hear the din of something.”

And it is the kindly echoes of that “din” that inhabit and personalise that outcry, uproar and silence of the stars mediated through her gently powerful piano voice.

With her on Utopia are guitarist Manu Codjia, bassist Yoni Zelnik with Donald Kontomanou on drums. On four of the tracks the Miami-born alto saxophonist David Binney makes up a quintet. Olivesi likens her wish for a utopia of sound to “the freedom to talk to trees, to flowers, to birds” and she has four confreres here who do that too with a sense of love and prime artistry.

The opener is Le Monde de Cyrano, a sauntering melody with Binney’s skipping alto making the melody and palavering with the comping Olivesi. There is nothing sombre about this world and when Olivesi dives into her dancing solo alongside Kontomanou’s flickering drums, she expresses a place of joy and exuberance. In Sunland there is intimacy of musicianship between her piano and Codjia’s softly-talking guitar: “Sit my friend close to me,” she sings, “I’ll tell you the great story of Sunland.”

Her Utopia still has Night and Day and Cole Porter’s beautiful tune, Darkness and Light Among the Planets, illuminated by Codjia’s brilliant guitar and Olivesi’s journeys up and down the keys of space. The time suddenly turns march-like as the journey’s end approaches, and straight into the electronic sonic world of Revolutions and the orbits of change. Zelnik’s delving bass, the heart of the quartet, leads the changes, and Kontomanou’s restless drums drive the engine of insurgence.

Con Calma is the story of a lonely bird growing to strength and power. “In the woods, strong as a tree,” sings Olivesi, “Tiny bird can fly and sing.” And he burgeons and thrives with the music: ‘In the blue, light as the wind/Shining bird has lit his wings.”

Binney’s alto sings a lyrical narrative, exchanging storytelling with Codjia’s guitar in a colloquy of nature before Olivesi’s lucid summative piano chorus.

The tones of Binney’s horn sound centuries old, like Cyrano’s words during his theme statements of Symphonic Circle, and as his pitch climbs he walks into modernity side by side with Olivesi’s crystalline notes.

Lune is a direct allusion to Cyrano’s States and Empires and is heralded by Kontomanou’s scattering drums. Binney’s notes fly everywhere and Codjia follows, picking up his patterns.

The final track, Summer Wings, won the Ellington composer award, and she is back to birdflight and birdsong. Codjia plays the melody, serene and temperate, Zelnik’s solo bass pecks into the earth, and Olivesi is grounding it all with her pianism, never dominating, never grandstanding, the least egocentric of musicians but one whose portion of sound is absolutely essential and formative.

Four centuries ago Cyrano asserted freedom of thought, of expression and of life. Olivesi does the same in her own sonic world.