ANOMALIES - BRUNO RUDER

It's been almost 20 years now - since his graduation from the CNSM, with a 1st prize in piano in his pocket - that Bruno Ruder has firmly established himself in the French jazz landscape, although it’s not necessarily where one would place him every time. Not that he lacks character and does not impose his signature with brilliance whatever the context, but the vast range of registers that he embraces and the claimed eclecticism of his tastes and commitments prevent him from being associated with a univocal style and from being reduced to a single genre.

It is necessary to say that, ever since he started being noticed at the beginning of the years 2000 for the smoothness and sophistication of his harmonic discourse in the delicate setting of the trio yes is a pleasant country alongside saxophonist Vincent Lê Quang and singer Jeanne Added, Bruno Ruder immediately enjoyed mixing things up and it is with a staggering musicality that he abandoned the diaphanous acoustics of his piano for the expressionist fury of electric keyboards and other synthesizers, integrating his science of rhythm and wild colors into the tumultuous universe of the mythical prog-rock group Magma. Cultivating from then on, without ostentation but with constancy, this great aesthetic split as a sign of recognition, Bruno Ruder was going to multiply, during the following decade, the collaborations in the most varied settings, within the group One Shot or the mini big band Radiation 10 ; and accepting quite recently to join the shapeshifting ONJ imagined by Frederic Maurin... 

Eight years have passed since his first solo record, but it is this same intimate and self-reflexive formula that the pianist decided to use today, for his second opus as leader. Still recorded by Gérard de Haro, Bruno Ruder, picks up where he left off with "Lisières" and continues with "Anomalies", his introspective quest to the sources of his poetry, committing himself ever further and ever more radically in this high-risk exercise. Choosing to record this album almost in a live setting, in the space of a single afternoon in the studio, Ruder launches himself into the unknown here, relying on his faculties of adaptation and his knowledge of the instrument to make the unexpected, even the error, the raw material of an unprecedented beauty.

Throughout the tracks, paying homage in a more or less subliminal way to the visual universes of Robert Crumb and Moebius, to Goethe's Faust and quantum physics, to Charles Ives and Lennie Tristano, to Olivier Messiaen and James Mac Gaw, Bruno Ruder invents a music that is both learned and impulsive, abstract and of a great materiality evoking more than once the cinematic art of Ran Blake.

In the end, affirming with ever more authority and mastery the independence of his artistic endeavours, profoundly free and devoid of any systemic spirit, Bruno Ruder signs with "Anomalies" an album of great maturity under its prismatic and spontaneous allure - affirming himself in this way, more than ever, as one of the most creative and exciting pianists of his generation.

Bruno Ruder: piano



Revue de presse

02-10-2023

Anomalies - Bruno Ruder

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