D’Agala by Sylvie Courvoisier Trio with Kenny Wollesen and Drew Gress

With her high-quality trio with Drew Gress and Kenny Wollesen, Sylvie Courvoisier presents her eleventh album on Intakt Records: Intakt CD 300. In both her playing and her composition she shows neoclassical influences mixed with European improvised music and the experimental nonconformismof the New York downtown scene.

The nine pieces on D'AGALA are dedicated to people who admired and influenced Courvoisier. The title tune is for pianist Geri Allen, "one of three dedicatees who passed away as this June 2017 recording was in preparation – the others being guitarist John Abercrombie and French politician, women’s rights advocate and Holocaust survivor Simone Veil. Two pieces are for sculptors, Martin Puryear who merges organic and geometric forms, and Louise Bourgeois. On “Bourgeois’s Spiders,” Courvoisier is all over the piano – plucking or strumming strings inside, or playing with one hand inside and one on the keys, or rattling around on the metal frame. Sometimes the band sounds like a trio of percussionists; they’re that rhythmically acute", writes Kevin Whitehead in the liner notes and adds: "Some pianists approach the instrument like it’s a cathedral. Sylvie Courvoisier sometimes treats it like a playground".

Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a native of Switzerland, has earned just renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the downtown jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades.
– “a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise,” according to The New York Times

sylviecourvoisier.com