By Brian Morton | Published September 2022
Eclecticism can be the emptiest of gestures. The clue’s in the title. David Helbock may look a serious bloke, but there is an intense playfulness in his work; not whimsy, not satire or pastiche, but simply the sense that music is a playground in which impossible things become possible and unlikely things happen all the time. In this, he has the ideal partner in Camille Bertault, who has her own sense of mischief.
It’s significant that the other artists nodded to in the course of Playground are Egberto Gismonti (the opening “Frevo”), the arch-trickster Thelonious Monk (“Ask Me Now”) and, right at the end, a tribute to the puckish Hermeto Pascoal, whose early work is currently enjoying a revival.
The air of mystery is sustained in the originals, notably Helbock’s “Das Fabelwesen,” meaning “mythical creature,” as well as Bertault’s wistful “Bizarre” and Poulenc-like “Aide-moi.”
These players have classical backgrounds, but as “Lonely Supamen” shows, they know the blues as well, even if their take on the form is unusual. They incorporate everything, from Russian and Icelandic mysticism to cryptozoology.
Jazz has always been large, always contained multitudes, but it’s acts like this — and labels like ACT — that keep the door open for new influences and experiences.
Playground: Frevo; Good Morning Heartache; Lonely Supamen; Etude In C-Sharp Minor, Op. 2, No 1; Aide-moi; New World; Das Fabelwesen; Dans ma boîte; Ask Me Now; Never Lived; Bizarre; Para Hermeto (52.37)
Personnel: Camille Bertault, voice; David Helbock, piano, percussion, live looping, effects.
Ordering Info: actmusic.com
