ZEBRES
Valentin Ceccaldi : cello
​David Chevallier : electric 7 string guitar, acoustic 6 & 12 string guitars, laptop
These two laudable French improvisers share their collective imaginations with the willing listener via these capacious works that include numerous trade-offs, mimicking lines and fastidious dialogues, occasionally intersected by nouveau chamber motifs. Essentially, the musicians are all over the map with a strong focus and a wealth of interesting propositions.
The duo seemingly maximizes their perceptual competencies on this winning release. With stark contrasts, droning extended notes, and subliminal melodies, they imply that angst and joy can seamlessly coexist as they weave structural elements with offbeat, yet not cantankerous exhibitions of camaraderie and sentiment.
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Glenn Astarita - All about Jazz
A strange and familiar universe where each beach reserves multiple quantities of unexpected pleasure. Like light, this music is undulatory and corpuscular. Einstein would surely have discovered that.
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Guy Sitruk - Jazz in Paris
If I dared, without fear of cliché, I would write "It's magic". It's written, and I assume it's true, but beyond the convenient formula that allows you to try and express the unspeakable, it's simply the expression of an obvious fact: in this encounter, there happens what sometimes (as often as possible!), improvisation without a net produces musical happiness, as immediate as it is resistant to the analysis of multiple listenings. A truly great moment of improvised music!
Xavier Prévost - Les Dernières nouvelles du jazz
Like the animal they embody, Ceccaldi and Chevallier are fiery and contrasting. Their meeting in the suburbs of Nantes brings together two generations and as many approaches and history which easily find common ground. The result is sometimes rough, but always a mutual respect that feeds an entire album that comes out almost naturally on the label Ayler Records which has been following Valentin's career for a very long time.
The adventurous and uncompromising tone is an ideal engine to gallop the striped equine. "The shadow of the zebra has no stripes", René Char is quoted inside the cover. Of this musical emulsion, one could not make a better criticism...
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Franpi Barriaux - Sunship
More than the words, however, the elegance of the sound immediately seduces the ear. Whether it is the exploitation of the possibilities of the guitar or the deeply human vibration of Valentin Ceccaldi's cello, the timbres are finely shaped and precisely arranged. Combining light noise effects with serpentine melodic lines supported by deviant arpeggios, the drawn motifs favor the evidence of form and the clarity of intentionality.
Because, without denying their assertive character, the two protagonists play on complementarity without an overload effect. By granting great mobility to the distribution of roles, they invite you to discover a limpid music that digs into confidence and gently offers a wandering that never seeks to reach the limits and their excesses. Privileging the effects of contrast, games on shadow and light, on black and white, these two zebras with a wide vocabulary synthesize several forms of aesthetics. With a permanent and natural inventiveness, they write, in the instantaneous and far from the tumults and the effects of fashion, a music at human height.
Discreet, no doubt, but who takes his time and also challenges him.
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Nicolas Dourlhès - Citizen Jazz
Concert recorded on October 8, 2018, at the Alliance Française theater in Paris, as part of the program "Unexpectedlyby Anne Montaron.