The Brooklyn Rail

Eve Risser has a tendency to work at the extremes, in terms of the number of her collaborators. She performs solo on prepared upright piano, but most of her recent tours have involved the Red Desert Orchestra, a large unit that is sometimes expanded even further. Whichever her chosen setting, this French composer and improviser has a marked penchant for the prepared piano, even if her approach to such interior tinkering might differ from many of her predecessors.

Risser recently completed a North European tour, stopping off at the Jazzkaar festival in Tallinn, Estonia. She fronted Red Desert, performing Eurythmia (Clean Feed, 2022), a set of works that involves uplifting themes, transcendent horn solos, iron foundry guitar, and a West African instrumental presence (balafons and djembe drums). Risser prompted, sang, and danced, but she also delivered several labyrinthine prepared piano solos. She’s equally concerned with the high and low keyboard extremes, highly percussive in her articulation, aggressive to subtle, then back, employing mallets, plastic sheets, and ratcheting wooden inserts. If we seek precedents for this particular Afro-jazz aura, Bengt Berger and Trevor Watts’ Moiré Music would be fitting examples, from back in the early 1980s, with their minimalist accumulations and cross-patterned evolutions.

The Red Desert concept was preceded by White Desert, a less groove-some, snow-inspired ensemble from around ten years ago, when Risser’s music was more impressionistic. The Red incarnation began playing in 2019, and has now become her primary vehicle. She’s brought both bands to multiple European festivals, including Moers, Jazz em Agosto, and Jazz Sous Les Pommiers, but it’s Jazzfest Berlin which has a particular devotion to her work. Both the Red and White groups have appeared there, but Risser also performed her Après un Rêve in 2019, a solo piece for prepared upright piano. Given its vertical nature, this instrument requires different techniques, also opening up to the possibility of foot-triggering on the exposed strings.

“I improvise around the ideas of my left-hand playing,” Risser says. “But I don’t develop the solo performances so much recently. I like so much to work with families and big groups, but I will do it again for sure. I have a lot of solo music to play, but I feel it’s so sad to tour by myself. I like to be with people.”

Risser stresses that there are so many folks around her working hard to make these shows happen. She considers this to be more of a collective effort than being about her own ego.

I love to play solo piano, but I try to produce orchestra structures, because I believe in this a lot. The left hand provides the rhythmic section, and bass, then I have a kick on the foot, and my right hand to improvise. At the moment I have to practice my left hand, so that makes it written, in a way, so I know I’ll improvise on a certain rhythm. I have habits that make my own sound set-up. I know where I have my tap dance sound, my bass line, my snare drum, and then I have stuff that I can remove during my playing, that makes a dampened sound that I like a lot, or more electroacoustic sounds.

Risser does not necessarily have strong influences from her prepared piano forebears.

I try to imitate drummers, I try to find a Tony Allen beat. I think that it’s pushing and challenging to try and imitate some other stuff. I practiced the prepared piano for many years on the grand piano, and then I wanted to find a new challenge with the upright. The sound is very rhythmical. It’s less interesting for dynamics and romanticism, and I have the hammers of the piano very close to my face, so I feel like there are mini-drums in front of me. The upright put me in this situation without me even choosing. It’s normal that the new challenge is the gravity, so I need to find attachments that don’t fall down. What you have left is not the liquid sounds, it’s more the dry sounds. I know how to find the right spot. It’s a way to become sincere with the instrument. With a grand piano, the sound goes to the lid, then to the audience, and with the upright the sound goes directly to my face. It’s really fantastic!

Risser has fed this experience into her orchestral compositions. “Red Desert had this continuing approach from the new prepared piano that I’d found. I wanted rhythm, grooves. I still love snow [White Desert] but I wanted to touch the sun part of my body, because I love to dance, and I love to move my body.”

Red Desert’s success has been hard-won. “I keep going, I don’t give up, but it’s many, many years since we toured [prior to this year’s prolific run]. It’s a lot to sell. You can make sure that you’re non-profit in the jazz field, when you have an orchestra.”

Given the stylistic combination of Red Desert, Risser is sensitive to the band’s make-up and homeland experience.

I wanted to mix people who don’t have the same background into my contemporary music band. In France we have a lot of different people that we’ve colonized, who came here, and are fantastic musicians. We don’t mix enough, or we mix in stereotypes, always, so I wanted to try something. I want to use the music for something. For me it’s not enough to just do music, there are sociological approaches that maybe we just put a little seed under. We cannot repair the colonization, but we can have a hug with our friends. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Three members are of West African origin, but are living in France. Djembe player Oumarou Bambara still spends much time in his native Burkina Faso, but the two balafon players now consider themselves totally French, versed in both pop and traditional styles. They don’t read music, so Risser concentrates on oral composition. Some gigs involve a further-extended line-up with women from Bamako (where Risser has been studying the balafon). She will be touring in January 2025 with this expanded sixteen-strong posse, and also working on a ballet setting.

Risser played solo and with her trio in Lisbon at the end of May, and has three Paris dates in June. The Causa Efeito festival in Lisbon was programmed by Clean Feed label boss Pedro Costa, a regular releaser of Risser records. Tragically, it looks like his operation may soon be forced to cease operations, due to funding woes. Risser is divided: “The problem is that I want to talk about them to everybody, but if it’s to say that they’re closing, it’s not a positive advertisement. It’s tricky.”

Risser remains quite prolific outside of her main bands. Before any of this, there was Donkey Monkey, a duo with drummer, sampler, and singer Yuko Oshima, that began playing together almost twenty years back.

I miss Yuko, so I play my bass and drums on my left hand! When we stopped playing we decided to do that because we were somewhere else, and the music didn’t come out so easily. We were saying, “should we take a break for a while?” We decided to stop because we didn’t make any new music for months. We thought, maybe we are retired!

More recently, in 2022, Risser released an album (Bestiaire #1) with a quartet led by reedsman Matthieu Donarier, on the Budapest Music Center label. Its drummer is Toma Gouband, who also works with stones and plants. Risser first met him at the Pannonica club in Nantes, and they played a set of prepared piano meets prepared drums. “The prepared piano for me was the exit to jazz,” Risser concludes.

Because my teacher said to me that I played bad jazz, but I loved it, although it was very hard to find my place as a woman. I was a flutist of contemporary music, and when I stopped that I missed some extra sounds in my piano, so the flute came into the piano. I felt I could put something very personal into the music. I needed to go on, because many people liked my music, except my teacher…!