Nefertiti Quartet : Live in Paris

For its fourth recording in eight years, and after ten years of existence, Nefertiti has chosen to play live and it is a perfectly relevant choice.

Not only has the quartet built up a loyal following over the years, but the collective playing and solo interventions of its members deserve to benefit from the freedom that live performance allows.

Indeed, this young group likes and practices a way of playing that is not common to the majority of classical quartets. Here the original compositions do not follow the traditional theme/solos/theme formula.

Often it is the interaction between the various instruments that dominates, letting the listener’s ear travel along the sounds distilled by Delphine Deau‘s piano and Camille Maussion‘s reeds, which weave a subtle and complex sonic framework, while Pedro Ivo Ferreira‘s bass and Pierre Demange‘s drums accompany them in an either tonic or more discreet way.

The resulting music, composed by Delphine Deau but collectively implemented, is sometimes dense and fiery, sometimes meditative and open to silence.

The name of the quartet comes from the title of a Wayne Shorter’s composition and in fact the playing of Nefertiti sometimes reminds us the last quartet of the American saxophonist who did not bend to the traditional codes of this type of formation either.

Besides it was relevant to give the name of an Egyptian queen to a band that has two women as main soloists.

It is thus a new and demanding sound universe that Nefertiti proposes to us and its members individually possess all the qualities which enable them to hold the attention by their individual performances as by their interplay.

A quartet to follow or to discover, and which, because of its originality, occupies in the French jazzistic landscape a place apart.