Eve Risser White Desert Orchestra - Les Deux Versants Se Regardent (2016)

Space in jazz, in the musical rather than the science fiction sense, is a difficult thing to pull off effectively. Miles Davis may well have said "don't play what's there, play what's not there" but Mr Davis said a lot of things including "if you don't know what to play, play nothing." Its like talking quietly—if you want people to make the effort to listen what you do have to say, then what you venture had better be good. You can hear this in the playing of Wadada Leo Smith in his album of the year collaboration with Vijay Iyer, but perhaps more surprisingly there is a surefooted grasp of the dynamics of musical space in this excellent new collection from Eve Risser and her White Desert Orchestra.

Risser is a 24 year old Paris based composer and musician who, on the evidence here, sits comfortably in the spaces between jazz, improvised and modern classical music. She released a well received CD Des Pas sur la Neige also on Clean Feed records in 2013 on which she played solo prepared piano. Risser has said that the White Desert Orchestra links to this through her intention that the current ensemble is "a form of orchestration of the piano" -the ten fingers needed to play the latter, corresponding to the ten members of the ensemble.