Fabrice Moreau – Ignorant as The Dawn

Fabrice Moreau’s vibration.

Drummer Fabrice Moreau continues to plough a deeply original furrow in today’s humdrum jazz soil. His second album as leader of a quartet is Ignorant as the Dawn. His music doesn’t trumpet, it insinuates itself, weaving itself into a subtle melisma of sonic architecture, giving rise to a diffuse, radiant lyricism.

Interview by Franck Médioni

Fabrice Moreau: I first explored drawing and painting, before turning to the drums around the age of 14, when the need for rhythm became irresistible. But music has always aroused intense emotions in me.

I’ve always been deeply receptive to harmony, which made my melancholic sensibility vibrate and connected me to my inner world. My sentimental education in music took place through a wide variety of styles: Brazilian music, chanson, Argentine tango, baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary…

Two of my uncles were particularly instrumental in my introduction to jazz. One, a lover of ’50s jazz, listened to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Clifford Brown/Max Roach quintet, while the other, younger, was passionate about ’70s and ’80s jazz – Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Weather Report – as well as Bill Evans and Michel Petrucciani…

My big aesthetic shock, when I’d just started drumming and was at that time mainly fascinated by pop drummers, was Michael Brecker’s first record under his own name on Impulse, with Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden.

From then on, my admiration for DeJohnette continued to grow, particularly in the Keith Jarrett trio, with whom I became almost “in love”. Later, I was deeply influenced by Bill Evans’ recordings with Paul Motian and Scott LaFaro.

Another major revelation at 17: Tony Williams in Nefertiti with the Miles Davis quintet. Then Roy Haynes, whose Question and Answer by Pat Metheny and Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs I listened to over and over again.

Jazz and songs

Before jazz imposed itself on me, it was through song that my musical practice began. From the age of 18/19 until around 28, I accompanied a number of singers, including Patrick Bruel, Jean-Louis Aubert, Alain Souchon, Arthur H, Mathieu Boogaerts, Albin de la Simone etc…
As time went by, I began to feel a certain weariness, a feeling of going round in circles. And driven by a constant thirst for research and progression, I found in jazz a boundless field of exploration. Jazz offers infinite possibilities for evolution, both on the instrument and in the development of my ear and my overall musical vision.

Rhythms and colors

As a drummer, I feel myself to be above all a rhythmicist sensitive to harmony, and above all a guarantor of the group’s pulse and dynamics. I don’t try to create colors but rather contrasts between dense and minimalist playing, between forte and pianissimo, often guided by my sensitivity to harmony, sometimes seeking to highlight a particular chord by letting it resonate on its own… But it’s the others who tend to think of me as a colorist, whereas I’m mainly obsessed with the rhythmic precision and fluidity that allow me to land on my feet when I jump into the void/silence. I try to keep my silences “dancing”… There’s always a watermark groove running through my playing, whether it’s played very clearly, partially or erased. I don’t say to myself before playing: “Here, I’m going to do some colors…”. I just let my sensibility and my hands do their thing, and it produces what it produces. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Sideman/leader

For a long time, I was more of a sideman than a leader. I felt the need to multiply my experiences, to enrich myself through contact with different aesthetics before committing myself to a personal project. By appropriating the music of others, I gradually discovered the essential elements of my musical identity. This process enabled me to get to know myself better, to understand what really resonated with me, and thus to start finding my own compositional language.

Being a leader, in the case of my band, means first and foremost coming up with compositions, having a vision and knowing how to communicate enthusiasm. Letting each musician make the music their own, without any prior indications, and then knowing how to grasp what suits me.

Spaces and dynamics

With Ricardo Izquierdo (tenor saxophone), Nelson Veras (guitar) and Jozef Dumoulin (piano, synth bass), we’re digging the same furrow. We continue to play on improvising spaces, dynamics, emptiness and fullness. I like to be surprised by the different proposals of the musicians… I like us to make the themes emerge clearly, then sometimes more obscurely… I like to play with contrasts in general. I think we go further in asserting our singularity as a group, assuming our strangeness, extreme legibility alternating with abstraction.

The album is dedicated to Matyas Szandai, who passed away in August 2023. I played with this magnificent bassist for seven years, in my band and his. For this record, we decided not to replace him, and to play in his absence in a way that celebrates his memory.

Ignorant as the dawn

This album title, Ignorant as the dawn is taken from a Yeats poem I love, “Dawn”: “I would – for all knowledge is worth no more than a wisp of straw – be ignorant and fanciful as the dawn.”

To forget what we know, to be only in sensation.

Trying to be one with nature without analyzing it, just as the dawn accompanies and blends with the elements, I would go further and try to be one with one’s own nature, to swim in oneself freely, freeing oneself from one’s references. Find your own language without showing off your erudition. Create/compose in a state of partial cultural amnesia. Rely only on my ears and emotions to grasp my uniqueness.

Musician, painter… For me, it’s all about being sensitive to the mysterious, the strange and the ineffable. And trying to express it through one’s own subjectivity.

Van Gogh’s adage “Find beauty in everything you can” also applies to me. In music, it would be to succeed in making every musical situation, even every mistake, sound beautiful.