Some twenty years ago, when he discovered by chance the music of the ‘murderous composer', the guitarist was fascinated by the complexity of the counterpoint and the harmonic framework, as rich as it is unpredictable, which coincided with his own formal experiments.
He has accomplished a variation on the form of the madrigal and not on the works of Gesualdo, which for their part have been subjected to a complex and original prolongation. Thus three creative agencies interact in this variation: the polyphony of the madrigals, the writing of David Chevallier, and the improvisations of the instrumentalists.
Over these two strata of writing (Gesualdo and David Chevallier), the instrumentalists superimpose their improvisations, at once inherited from the different tendencies of jazz and contributing their own innovations. These three creative agencies, far from constituting a collage, develop as an extension of the notion of counterpoint, conceived as the superimposition not only of melodic lines but also of distinct aesthetics.
But David Chevallier listens to the music of Gesualdo not with irony but with wonder. The ‘variations' do not partake of today's prevailing postmodernism but are inscribed in the continuity of jazz, conceived not as a style, but as a process constantly nourishing itself on other aesthetics. This quest for alterity in jazz is convincing and successful only if it restores the link with the emancipatory urge that gave it birth.
In the dialectics of order and disorder instituted by composers like Gesualdo and Dowland at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, David Chevallier seems to find a very singular response to this need for alterity. The musician who questions his own aesthetic through another current of musical thought in the form of an enigma escapes from the asepsis that menaces all forms of expression in our contemporary world. But the freedom thus conquered does not stop at the frontiers of jazz and improvised musics. To be persuaded of this, after listening to the ‘variations', one need only return to the original version of these madrigals. Then it will be understood that this counterpoint of aesthetics, so skilfully handled by David Chevallier, also invites us to a renewed and deconditioned way of listening to the works of Gesualdo.
