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Benoit Delbecq 5 Pursuit (SGL 1529-2) with François Houle (clarinet), Michael Moore (reeds), Jean-Jacques Avenel (acoustic bass), Steve Argüelles (drums & electronics) One the most innovative young keyboardists & composers of the '90s has forged a personal approach from jazz, ambient, contemporary classical, and non-western musics. His playing on prepared piano reveals fugitive harmonies and a rich palette of colors and phrasings. Polyphonic rhythmic-melodic "fabrics" suggest balafon, sanza, pygmy music, gamelan, or John Cage. His new international quintet creates a collective music with the shape-shifting, mutatating quality of a waking dream, a feeling augmented by Argüelles' stealthy live sampling and processing. Previous release: François Houle/Benoît Delbecq, Nancali (SGL 1519-2)   “Pursuit is all about underlying themes that transgress rather seamlessly. Part of the beauty of this recording resides in the transient nature of these pieces as though the musicians were moving about or continuing their journey looking to explore new terrain or to take in the scenery as a group of artists on a mission seeking inspiration for further endeavors. Recommended!” * * * * —Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz   “[Delbecq] figures today among the most inventive musicians on the European scene...Enlightened experimenter of a music decidedly personal in the way it links apparently contradictory influences from the freest improvisation and the ultra-sophisticated constructions of contemporary composers such as Ligeti or Conlon Nancarrow, Delbecq has succeeded in transcending this apparent dispersion in a coherent universe, at once limpid and mysterious, that draws its supreme liberty from a conceptional rigour which has few equals in contemporary music....A music of nocturnal poetry, apparently fluid and deceptively slack, all minute shimmerings and the play of braided textures, controls the flows and effects of superimpositions (of intensity, speeds, materials). One rediscovers what gives Delbecq's music its mad charm - that delirious complexity of rhythmic fabrics with their insistent interlacing motifs repeating/transforming, evolving organically; that work on suspension, with its sensation of brusque accelerations stopped cold by imperceptible apneas. Beyond this, one feels here a new maturity, evidence of gestures that transcend the high sophistication of compositional devices put to work — something on the order of inspiration. It's rare these days.” —Stéphane Ollivier, Les Inrockuptibles

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