Becoming Sound

On stage, there is something of a Monsieur Hulot-esque quality to Joëlle Léandre. She hunches over her big double bass, leaning forward with furrowed brow, huffing and puffing as she plays, sometimes letting those huffs and puffs emerge as full-throated vocalizations, each one a triumphant bof! of simultaneous exultation and exasperation. Watching her solo set at this year’s London Contemporary Music Festival at Woolwich Fireworks Factory, I was struck by the way her extempore playing emerges: not as a more-or-less systematic development and variation of spontaneously generated motifs, nor as kind of pure cry of unconstrained expression, some cathartic emptying out of the soul. Rather, it emerges as something like the careful opening out of a seed contained within the initial gesture. In the course of this germination, Léandre seems to try on different characters, different modes of playing and embodiment, in the course of which a myriad new sonic life forms blossom and flower.

Born to a working-class family in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France in 1951, Léandre initially played the recorder before switching to double bass. She attended the prestigious Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Paris before embarking on a freelance career that would see her perform with the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Daniel Barenboim, and Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble intercontemporain. John Cage dedicated his “Ryoanji” to her; Giacinto Scelsi his “C’est bien la nuit” and “Le réveil profond.” Meanwhile, a chance encounter with free jazz while she was still a student led to a lifelong engagement with improvised music. Léandre has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, George Lewis, and countless others. With over 200 recordings to her name and a seemingly ceaseless schedule of live shows, today Léandre is one of Europe’s most sought after and most remarkable performers.

In conversation, Léandre can be as profuse and unconstrained as she is onstage, frequently breaking off into onomatopoeia or to do the voice of whichever musical luminary she’s sharing an anecdote about. We spoke in her hotel, the morning after the concert, about drinking with the AACM in New York, dining at John Cage’s apartment, and why a Brian Ferneyhough score can feel like a prison.