There are plenty of pretty jazz albums but not too many purely beautiful ones. The temptation – especially if you’re playing piano – is always to lushness rather than a purer simplicity. Dear C. is very beautiful, and it is very pure. It is intimate music, in the sense of the salon rather than the confessional or the bedroom.There are nods towards Carla Bley’s irony and sense of mischief on a few tracks (“Ad Infinitum,” “Baseball” and “Wolfgang Tango”) but what Luescher elicits from her music is above all a sense of lightness. It is a trio album, but it has the intimacy of a duo album: Olshausen’s cello sparingly underlines Bley’s themes, but at the core of the album is the pairing of the (very Konitzian) alto saxophonist Nathanael Su and pianist Fredi Luescher, who sound sometimes as if they’re in a competition to see who can use the fewest notes. (If so, Luescher probably wins, even though he’s using a chordal instrument.) Tempos are unhurried – “Baseball” would be a midtempo piece on any other album but here comes off as a flagwaver – but by no means ponderous: it’s just that they convey a feeling of rhythmic balance rather than momentum. It’s a consistently beguiling record, though there are some high points: the opening readings of “Fleur Carnivore” and “Sing Me Softly of the Blues” (on the Altrisuoni website, Luescher relates that it was the latter composition which inspired him to record this disc), and the captivating eight-minute version of “Around Again.” (For some reason “Around Again” is here credited to Paul, not Carla Bley. So far as I’m aware it is Carla’s tune like the rest, unless the liner notes to Paul’s Footloose! contain an error.) Dear C. is not an album of great scope or textural variety, just fifty minutes of music that couldn’t be improved on – and what more could you ask of a jazz disc?

Nate Dorward

Cadence, July 2003