CD version. Characters on a Wall is the thirteenth ECM album by French clarinettist Louis Sclavis, and the first on which he leads the classic jazz line-up of reeds, piano, bass and drums. Its starting point is the street art of Ernest Pignon-Ernest, whose drawings pasted onto walls had already inspired Sclavis's earlier ECM album Napoli's Walls. This time he looks at a wider range of those in situ works, from Rome to Ramallah, searching for "a dynamic, a movement that will give birth to a rhythm, an emotion, a song."
Sclavis plays clarinet and bass clarinet. Pianist Benjamin Moussay, already heard on his albums Sources and Silk and Salt Melodies, is joined by two younger players, bassist Sarah Murcia and drummer Christophe Lavergne. The quartet recorded in October 2018 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. "Ernest's work speaks to me very directly," Sclavis told Jazz Journal, though the music never sets out to illustrate the images literally.
Five pieces are by Sclavis, one by Moussay, and two short Esquisse sketches are credited to all four musicians. Some titles point to Pignon-Ernest's portraits of real people, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, whose image the artist pasted around Ramallah. The opening L'heure Pasolini sets a melancholy atmosphere, then turns without warning into something close to a waltz. La dame de Martigues brings out Moussay's lyrical side, and the closing Darwich dans la ville leaves room for his piano motifs and for Murcia's bass figures.
Reviewers noted how close to jazz this group sounds compared with the reeds, cello, voices and electronics of Napoli's Walls. In The Times John Bungey wrote that "the mood is delicately bitter sweet, full of brooding lyricism with tunes rarely moving at above walking pace." For Filipe Freitas of Jazz Trail, "Sclavis' new angle of approach is a triumph."
CD edition, ECM 2645, released in September 2019, with liner notes by Sclavis and Stéphane Ollivier in French and English and photographs of Pignon-Ernest's work.
