Sound, surrounded by a vast and icy silence is suffocating precision and crystalline purity, sweetness and a silk thread cutting edge (ECM thank you: classical pianists are rarely so well served ... ) Notes strung beaded one by one as if they were just "passing through", glittering fleetingly before us in a path that comes from elsewhere and also prevail (beyond our listening) as "let fall" by a totally inhabited artist haunted by this trajectory a moment captured and set of sound in space, unprecedented deployment of its harmonics, and perhaps this fact that the difference between being and not being.
Yes, there really is something cosmological and existential in this piano there, and we can not not think of "Footprints in the Snow" by Debussy (6th prelude of the first book): the same music borders, even scarcity of notes requires their absolute justification, even contrast between the immediate vicinity of the piano and the infinity of the surrounding silence, even exact science and unstoppable crack the note "just", the note "blue", the "next door" to the expected, and will tear your heart (Monk!) short, with the same parentage as Debussy himself recognized as a perfect model, Chopin.
No doubt there then there's nothing there very experimental or very innovative from the standpoint of "aesthetic", and true jazz connoisseurs there they may find their account no: Tord Gustavsen do seem concerned at all costs to invent a new language, an absolutely singular idiom. But should we really blame him, if he testifies himself something universal ("naive", say the thinkers)? What matters even vanity vainglory? of plastic or formal innovation, in which case "silence of infinite spaces", as Pascal says, to metaphysical anguish to die and lose everything we love, to the most intense dismay at every second happening and will never return, never again?
The new questions obviously require a new language. But the classics? And who could argue without the utmost arrogance and bad faith they can arise at all, there is nothing permanent or universal about the human condition (Death? Infinity? Why something rather than nothing?), and that we as "modern", thank you god, we alone, "not be anymore" and would have the privilege of a lucidity that has eluded all others? "It's always the same ball that we play, but instead one better," said Pascal again, comparing the performance of intelligence at tennis: Tord Gustavsen, like Debussy or Chopin, as Monk or Bill Evans, knows exactly square ball of the tonal system, play (flirting) with and on the lines, without, of course, seek to exceed them. But should it really discredit? In any case, if other routes are possible, it is paradoxically and acquires his own voice by not trying to be original, but absolutely sincere, absolutely correct and absolutely intelligible. In two words: truth, rather than nine - which is after all a possible definition of "classicism".
So "elevator music", I do not mind, but Debussy, yet he already said about this Grieg this distant fellow Gustavsen, and I do not think as far as his music bears so much worse. Bach was held old-fashioned in his lifetime, Rachmaninov, too, and it reproduces Monet and Renoir on boxes of chocolates: AND THEN?
One last thing: a few weeks after I received this disc, Tord Gustavsen was visiting for a concert not far from my home. So I immediately went to listen, and I was again overwhelmed by the absolute sincerity and depth of his commitment to the music, as the only way to show (surely not explain) the existence itself, its gap, its enigma. This man lives fully what he does, plays in his life he completely immersed in playing the piano, insensitive to anything other than the sound (neither room nor its partners seem to count for anything other than "Settings" strictly sound, with which it takes to express accurately as possible what we saw, what "is"), like a Glenn Gould or Michelangeli formerly a Pogorelich or Sokolov today ...
This absolute commitment and absolute sincerity carries everything, I think. Or he would decree that Billie Kathleen Ferrier, Bob Dylan, Pascal, Baudelaire, John Cassavetes, Samson François or Amy Winehouse as they use language decidedly too "classic". Like them (the list is not exhaustive), Tord Gustavsen can communicate directly and immediately with perfect accuracy sensitive, perfect "correctness", a profound experience, universal and true of consciousness and should be, really, other thing?!? Vanity aesthetics.
