Jazz Impression - Le Vice et la Paresse, France 1978

After hearing the superb Jean-Jacques Ruhlmann's Imagination, Enigme Infini, I checked his discography to see if possibly there are more treasures to be unearthed.  Oddly enough this brilliant sax and flute player did not have a lot of credits in terms of composition.  The one piece by him on this 1978 outing, called "Si le Coeur eclate" is just stunning though, very much of the same temperament and style as the previous posting, with chamber arrangements to add immense interest.  In fact the whole record turned out to be mysteriously gorgeous and brilliantly composed, the majority from the pianist whose name is Francois Couturier.  He as well is not quite as prominent in a seventies discography as one would expect or hope.

The album title (vice and laziness) is taken from the side-long suite which takes up the whole of the second side, written again by the pianist.  This was recorded in Tours, a beautiful city in the Loire valley with a gorgeous cathedral and many medieval-era houses.  The Loire valley, in the Western part of France, is brimming with gorgeous fairy-tale castles in a forested and bucolic landscape and is to me (like clichéd Tuscany) one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Anyways, this is how we try to discover lost treasures, by following long-lost leads, cold cases now sitting in bins in record stores all over the world, one of which might turn out to be a classic utterly forgotten to mankind...

Anyone have any idea of a good free uploader for song samples?  Now I have exhausted my 2-hour free limit for soundcloud, which is a beautiful site, but I don't want to spend a dozen dollars a month on something that I am doing for nothing.

Jean-Jacques Ruhlmann - Impression L'enigme Infinie....



"No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created"   David Hilbert the famous mathematician once said regarding infinity, and although in his discipline it's essential (a constructible mathematics is possible without it but with difficulty and apparently incomplete), it's still debatable whether or not infinity has real existence, out there in reality.  In quantum physics the infinity can't exist in space and time because of Heisenberg uncertainty-- there is a smallest unit of both -- and yet, for the equations to be solved, infinity must exist in the renormalization process.  What about the universe?  Although many if not most physicists believe there is a 'multiverse' out there of multiple universes of which ours is merely one, on the basis of the theory of inflation, both commonsense and logic argue against the concept of an infinity of universes...

Is it better to have a finite universe and be nagged by the issue of what is outside it and what came before it, or an infinite universe?  If the latter, unfortunately we are faced with such conundrums as the provable assertion that there is not just another me out there typing this, but in fact an infinity of me's out there typing this.  So which one is the real me?  In the next few years the new Planck satellite is likely to settle the issue of whether or not inflation is true or not, and it might turn out that it's not and the likelihood this universe is unique will increase.

But there is one thing I am sure about now after a lifetime of thinking on the topic, it's that humanity will never definitely answer those questions I first asked my father as a boy, where did the universe come from, what is outside it, how will it end?  Although I understand the optimism of physicists I'm reminded of an interview with Noam Chomsky the famous linguist (and revolutionary) in which he said something along the lines of this, 'If a chimpanzee were presented with calculus, or quantum mechanics, he would never no matter the effort come to understand it.  In the same way, isn't it likely that the human mind also will never understand some things, because of its very structure, and that we will never know what those are?  Because evolution is not capable of creating perfection.'

A beautiful cover foretells a beautiful album of chamber jazz such as the French were able to accomplish absolutely perfectly in those days... and since the subject is the infinite enigma, expect some very intellectual and dreamy music...

Ruhlmann is the composer and plays flutes, soprano sax, and clarinet.  In this opus from 1981, he is rounded out by Philippe Maté on saxes, Francois Couturier on piano, Merzak Mouthana on percussion, and Francois Mechali on double bass.  On the given discography he only has one other record listed, from 1978, unfortunately.  In the French online store cdandlp only this one.

The first track is quite representative:

 My other favourite is the Merzak Express, which features a beautifully done chamber score intro with bowed double bass, clarinet, and sax, showing the modern classical education Ruhlmann possessed, this passes into a zeuhlish piano ostinato figure with a wonderfully exciting crescendo build... progressive music at its finest.