Photographs of the French pianist Sophie Agnel in performance are as likely to show her stooping studiously over the innards of the instrument, shuffling cups, foil, rubber balls or fishing line around the soundboard, as they are to catch her conventionally perched on the stool. A classically trained artist who shifted first to jazz and then by the early 1990s to free-improvisation, Agnel has twisted the “prepared-piano” methods of John Cage towards her own abstract yet dramatically coherent ends. A regular with France’s Orchestre National de Jazz (the organisation admiringly describes her as one of an elite coterie of European “keyboard heretics”), she merges powerful orthodox piano skills with methods that make the conventional, unbugged instrument sound almost unrecognisably different. On a rare UK visit, she came to reconvene the occasional trio she shares with Britons John Edwards (double bass) and Steve Noble (drums).
In a single packed set that stretched from ripples and whispers to wall-bulging raw noise and even a groove or two, Agnel and her partners showed what happens to free improvisation when artists who combine big techniques and big ears are playing it. At the outset, Agnel quietly tapped chords while Edwards bowed high-pitched whistles behind the bass’s bridge and Noble’s stick caressed the edges of his cymbals. The latter then launched into a thickly textured rumble of low-drums sound while Agnel scattered fast, woodpecker-tapping vibrations and insistent hisses from rubbing foil or metal on her strings. The gig constantly swung from the rammed intensity of a much larger band to intimate conversations, with tight collective passages skimming at breakneck tempos, and then falling back to quietly playful piano motifs, against delicate brushwork from Noble and purring bass hums from Edwards, as if all three were following an impromptu score, telepathically shared. A long first piece was followed by several shorter vignettes, each distinctive in character – from an episode opened by a riff-like bass hook, to a groove with Agnel playing an almost conventional chord vamp, to an exit on a softly receding bass drone. It was music made in a fearlessly speculative way by fine-tuned experts in the art.
