There’s a sense of discovery running through the album, as if each piece were a puzzle they’re solving together in the moment.
Intakt Records
Sylvie Courvoisier – piano; Wadada Leo Smith – trumpet
Some duos tiptoe around each other, careful not to collide. Courvoisier and Smith are bolder than that. Yes, there are moments of circling, testing, listening—that’s where the intrigue lies. Angel Falls captures two masters building music in real time, shaping conversations that can be hushed and searching one minute, raw and emphatic the next.
On Angel Falls the pair avoid charts, overdubs, even second takes. They sat down, played straight through, and by late afternoon the record was finished. The eight pieces unfold as living conversations between piano and trumpet. As Courvoisier recalls: “We just played right through exactly the order of the CD, and exactly the amount of music on the CD, with no edits. We probably did that in two hours.”
Courvoisier is fearless at the piano, sometimes chiseling at the keys in sharp, “pecky” bursts, sometimes rumbling low notes like distant thunder. In performance, she’ll lean into the instrument, reach inside to pluck or scrape the strings, or jab at the keyboard with a pointed finger as if calling out a target. Smith, meanwhile, moves between muted whispers and declarative blasts, always with a sense of control. When he holds a note aloft, she’ll answer with a splash of high-register flurries; when she digs into the bass strings, he might retreat into airy breaths through his horn.
Angel Falls in Venezuela plunges nearly a kilometer, tumbling through mountainous rock, mist, and jungle, a spectacle of height, force, and delicate spray. The centerpiece of the album, the title track, ‘Angel Falls,’ mirrors that grandeur. The music rises and falls in waves: piano flurries tumble across the midrange, trumpet alternates between sustained clear tones and breathy, twisting passages, sometimes dominating, sometimes receding. At over ten minutes, it flows unpredictably, from delicate textures to sudden bursts of intensity.
On ‘Naomi Peak,’ Smith opens with a blast of trumpet that grabs you like a reveille call on a too-cold winter morning, answered by Courvoisier’s fluttering midrange figures and hammered chords. At first they spar—his breathy, half-formed phrases tossed out like quick retorts, her piano circling and then striking back. As the piece develops, Smith’s tone sharpens and grows more forceful, while Courvoisier pushes forward with hard-driving runs and abrupt shifts. The tension builds and recedes in surges, like an argument that refuses to settle.
Where ‘Naomi Peak’ feels like a debate, ‘Whispering Images’ turns inward. Smith plays muted trumpet, soft and reserved, while Courvoisier lets small piano phrases ripple across the upper register, a quiet swirl rising from underneath. At times she taps and scrapes inside the piano, creating sounds that suggest a hidden drummer in the mix. The trumpet answers in clipped, delicate phrases, never breaking the fragile balance the two maintain.
Both artists bring lifetimes of experience — Smith with his majestic trumpet sound, a voice that can move from blues inflection to pure abstraction, and Courvoisier with her mix of classical precision and free-jazz daring. Yet what stands out on Angel Falls isn’t pedigree but playfulness.
There’s a sense of discovery running through the album, as if each piece were a puzzle they’re solving together in the moment.
Smith put it more simply: playing with Courvoisier feels like “going there to save creation.”
