Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven

CD version. 7 fleeting compositions for piano.

Memory and improvisation. A mysterious paradox. The improvisation flies away and the musical score stays. Here is something preserved from the irreversible flow of time, which should not have left any trace except in the memory of a few listeners.

Paradoxically, when I came up with the project of this improvisation album,recorded in Brussels in March 2009, my first intention was to compose written music. At the moment of writing, I realised that all that I had been dreaming of laying on paper, all these fleeting moments of sound which go through me and which I had been striving to capture by writing them down, as one would in a musical photograph, all these moments vanished as soon as I attempted to hold on to them, to place them in the golden cage of a music score. Reality escapes us the moment we choose to tell it rather than live it. I understood that all that had seemed so urgent to write down was already there, as a seed, in these moments when I sit at the piano to improvise freely, I mean without a canvas, or anything pre-determined. It is in this spirit that I have tried to record this new CD, free of any will to play this or that, annihilating as much as possible all 'will' to express anything in particular.To be merely a channel, through which flows an energy springing out of a certain constellation, made of a place, a specific moment, the energy emitted by those present, all the circumstances which make each moment unique. It is utopic, a state which I would like to come close to. But there are blessed moments, moments of pure abandonment, when one forgets to will, to think, to want to be intelligent, to have control. It is for the sake of such moments of inner truth, that I do what I do. Should they be extremely rare.