Morgane Carnet — alto & baritone saxophones
Jozef Dumoulin — keyboards, effects
Fanny Lasfargues — electroacoustic bass, effects
Damon Locks — electronics, voice
Macie Stewart — violin, vocals
Like an asymmetrical formation, where the apparent instrumental imbalance reveals other, more fragile and adventurous balances. These five free spirits, who had never played together before meeting in Chicago in April 2022, came together around one imperative: the desire to explore a musical territory saturated with waves and shadows, hic et nunc, right here, right now. One of Chicago’s most renowned poets and visual artists, a musician in his own time, with a violinist free of all constraints. And among the long-established new wave from France: a seismic, sinuous saxophonist, a rocky, irreverent bassist and a truly unpredictable keyboardist. The art of improvisation in its loosest sense, as a cartography of the sensitive.
Saturday, September 28, Dijon. The whole world is talking about it tonight or this morning. The series of metamorphoses first observed in April 2022 on the shores of Lake Michigan continued this weekend in the prefecture of the Côte-d’Or department. Sometimes a mystical fog can turn into a battling fog that pierces and tears its way across fascinating seabeds in the open air, in the middle of the night. At La Vapeur, the festival that welcomes Morgane Carnet, Jozef Dumoulin, Fanny Lasfargues, Damon Locks and Macie Stewart, aka Morphose, isn’t called Tribu for nothing.
Sunday, September 29, Quetigny. At La Parenthèse, a media library commandeered by (la) Tribu on a Sunday near Dijon, Fanny Lasfargues and Damon Locks duet have been renamed Black Music & Bass Power. The fact is that Stokely Carmichael is not far away, in the great tumult of voices where one picks, in the great din of voices that the other caramelizes. And so, their procession ends in the twisting bark of meaning and the resin of sound.
Tuesday, October 1, Lyon. At the controls of the spacecraft curiously named the Periscope, the five explorers attempt to establish a new form of extraterrestrial communication with their secret incantations and cosmic sounds. The deluge of voices, buzzes and saturations explodes, then dries up in a soft landing on a newly (meta)morphosed planet Earth. With the audience begging for more, the band offer a final stroll under the stars.
Wednesday, October 2, Nîmes. In the contagious intimacy of the Petit Théâtre, in the shade of the trees of the Placette and its history, a play is performed for the enthusiastic ears of a small crowd gathered on the colorful benches. Eight streets – eight winds – converge on the Placette, through which craftsmen, workers, merchants and revolutionaries have wandered for centuries. On the stage of Morphose’s theater, eight artisans enter and leave. Morphose welcomes Robin Fincker (tenor saxophone and clarinet), Bernard Santacruz (double bass) and Samuel Silvant (drums) to sing of the scope of the world and the adventures of the wind’s passengers.
Thursday, October 3, Avignon. The universe is vast, and therefore full of monoliths (with a very precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9 (1² : 2² : 3²). There’s one right now, for example, in the back of the Palais des Papes, in the AJMI room on the second floor, and Morphose is spinning around it. Spins for a long time, before his guest for the evening, Blanche Lafuente on drums, turns a few invisible keys in invisible locks. A melody, too, is an enigma, haunted by many voices from here and now, or from yesteryear and elsewhere. And Morphose’s electro-acoustic improvisations are sometimes like clouds of clear smoke above a clear fountain.
Friday, October 4, Simorre. The creators and cooperators of the Bistrot Culturel du Bouche à Oreille, who welcome us to the Gers this evening, have been inspired by the ideas of Chicago activist Saul Alinski in the field of community organizing. And it’s a bit like the music of creation and cooperation that’s made by improvising together, and this evening with the support of Aymeric Avice on trumpet and stirring. Music that moves forward, music that fades away.
In Flavigny or Le Beaucet, outdoors or indoors, on stages, in crypts in clearings, between trees and columns, since the living pillars always let out confused words, the magi of Morphose (and even Jozef D., the one who knows how to disappear), sow and cultivate mysteries. Like good candy since 1591.
Tuesday, October 8, Pantin. In its second week, this will be the week of all visits, but in reverse. Last week, for example, Morphose visited the candy factory in the former Benedictine abbey at Flavigny-sur-Ozerain. Except that tonight, at La Dynamo de Banlieues Bleues, a former burlap factory, it will end with Mike Ladd, the band’s guide to Flavigny. And it won’t end like that for Morgane Carnet, Jozef Dumoulin, Fanny Lasfargues, Damon Locks and Macie Stewart, from their beautiful pantomimes to their great plunges to the deepest depths of immersion, it won’t end without passing through a few coral reefs and sunken cities. Like an aniseed patiently wrapped in thin layers and prickles of sound.
Wednesday October 9, Nantes. We had to fight our way through the thick curtain of rain to reach the Pannonica, the refuge for smugglers of the musical world. Once in the shelter, Morphose turned on its abyssal underwater machinery to thwart the deluge that fell on the city with big boils and big evaporations (including the high lung, like the blast furnace, of a veuze for a moment in the hands of Florent Wattelier). Until we end up wandering under a sky as clear as the streets rinsed by the floods.
Thursday, October 10, Nantes. On the following day, Damon Locks and Fanny Lasfargues, dressed in their most beautiful garments of light and luminous strips, are on a duo mission. Damon’s enchanted radio echoes sizzling words: “musicians…jazz…living…their time”. Never mind: they’ll ignore time to explore space. Fanny digs into the earth with her pedals, while Damon embraces the air. This last dance at the Pannonica takes on the allure of a ballet of comets no longer in a straight line.
Friday, October 11, Tours. At Le Petit faucheux, they’re so good at what they do, they’re supersonic chemists of acoustics and electronics. Imagine having turned on five radios simultaneously, on different frequencies, or spending your time changing frequencies, as Damon Locks does. Without finding the channel, finding the channel, the pool in which all sounds and noises bathe. Then Jean-Luc Cappozzo on trumpet and flugelhorn (and reed flute), and Léa Ciechelski on alto saxophone, fall from the sky. Choral effect guaranteed: Morphose rises from the water and transforms into a rose of winds and sands.
Saturday, October 12, Poitiers. Morphose, without guests this time, is on the program for the third Baïnes, the cycle of events that has kept Jazz à Poitiers on the cutting edge of open music, even in this age of cuts and fences. As it happens, at Confort Moderne and in early autumn, the music is like the resurgence of a river regaining its dried-up bed. It gradually covers the expanse of space that exists between the five musicians and beyond themselves. Perhaps even as far as 22, Little Red, Hard Hat and Tangle Eye, collected in Damon Locks’ space-time transmissions. Open music welcomes many people, from the future or from yesteryear, like these four prisoners from a penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi, visited by Alan Lomax in 1947, who resume their singing, interspersed, with Morphose, Early in the Mornin’…
Sunday, October 13, Poitiers. It’s Sunday morning in the red-and-black theater of the Le Local socio-cultural center, and time for Jozef Dumoulin and Fanny Lasfargues to make pacts with the improvisers of the PIL (PoCo Improvisation Laboratory), as well as with violist Karam Al Zouhir and saxophonist Olivier Duverger Houpert, who played the day before. And then again today. Collective improvisation as a practice of existence (as a critique of everyday life), poetic and political, musical and otherwise. We do it, we invent it, we talk about it, we move on. We compare or we don’t compare.
Morphosis in front of Levoy Exile’s Three Zombies around the Cross; in front of Othello (not the Moor of Venice, but the abstract combinatorial board game); in front of the sharing of small, round, white, hard, green aniseed and sugared pills.
Tuesday, October 15, Brest. To finish, to open, it’s time for the Atlantique Jazz Festival (and its focus on Brazil this time). To start the day, Macie Stewart is alone with the noon demon and some forty people in the audience, in the Bad Seeds Records shop, as if to reinvent blues or folk or music, from limbo to clouds, then from clouds to a single song still covered in a fine feather down. Ethiopian singer Eténèsh Wassié is on hand to savor the occasion. After dark, Damon Locks duets with his partner from Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra: drummer Mauricio Takara. The case is in the bag: rhythms, machinery, machinations, machines, humans, whirlwinds. They are our people. We are our people. Deal. As for Morphose, swinging and striking ever harder, bristling with sonic barricades (the quintet will of course be inviting Mauricio to join them), we now understand better the origin of their band name. They’re mutants, shapeshifters, they could go on like this for a long time, becoming, it wouldn’t change a thing and it would change everything. Pure bliss.
Damon Locks at Lycée Gustave Eiffel in Gagny; Damon and Macie Stewart with students from the Music Department of Université Paris 8 | Vincennes – Saint Denis; Macie and Morgane Carnet with final-year students from Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes; Damon and Macie, again in tandem, with 3rd-year students from Collège du Château in Morlaix; Morgane with Fanny Lasfargues and students from Lycée Fénelon in Brest… The baton was passed during the day too, and in this game, which is certainly not a competition, everyone is a winner, all questions are asked, and there are always so many possible solutions.
Farewell but not goodbye certainly for Morphose. The art of metamorphosis, after all, is practiced all the time: for example, when Damon Locks draws Sun Ra’s shiny face in graphite and India ink (courtesy of the artist, as it’s for an exhibition organized by the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery, first in Cologne, then in Chicago, on covers to be imagined for imaginary Sun Ra records). For example, when Macie Stewart draws cards, playing cards, greeting cards, mental cards, it’s the format that counts, and you can suggest to your friends that they make an exquisite corpse to replace the Queen of Spades; an exquisite corpse like that strange object from Greece or Byzantium, like a kind of pendulum or a kind of balance, found along the way… Farewell, Morphose.
