No(w) Beauty

The Urgency of Beauty – Enzo Carniel

(un)Seen is the new recording by the group NO(w) Beauty, of which pianist Enzo Carniel is one of the four members. This highly collective quartet blurs boundaries and surprises with a subtle blend of modern jazz, European classical music, hip-hop, and electronic sounds.

I can’t really take credit, since my parents pushed me—almost forced me—to play the piano at the age of five. I didn’t like it much at first, but I had a sensitivity somewhere inside me. My father, a double bassist, had me listening to jazz from a very early age. The real revelation and passion came when I was fourteen or fifteen, when I began to study it seriously. I devoured everything: the tradition, albums, recorded broadcasts like Jazz 6, but also classical music and repertoire (Ravel, Bach, Chopin, etc.). I studied classical music at the Toulon conservatory with an extraordinary teacher (Claude Guiraud), while also taking jazz lessons with another teacher (Elie Portal), and playing in local workshops. Later, the jazz class opened in Toulon with Nicolas Folmer; I then joined the Marseille conservatory, and later the Paris Conservatoire in 2010.

My main piano influences are Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Masabumi Kikuchi, John Taylor, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Lennie Tristano, Sonny Clark, Brad Mehldau…

House of Echo

House of Echo is the project of all possibilities. At least for me! I place absolutely NO limits on creation in this group: writing sci-fi short stories, using texts, samples, electronics, ambient music, advanced conceptual composition, visual research, collaborations with rappers. For me, it is a space of imagination, dreamlike, carried by the language of jazz and improvisation but teleported into the future, and also into a timeless spirituality.

With this music, I try to reconcile opposites, to stretch things to their extremes: it’s inclusive. It questions the place of jazz and art in our present time and seeks a greater form of faith and devotion, to recreate a kind of almost liturgical music with all these elements. That’s also why nobody programs us… haha. The project is almost too ambitious, impossible to categorize. It’s cyberpunk jazz that advocates love. That might sound like a big word today, but that really is the essence of the project.

The group NO(w) Beauty was formed nine years ago in an informal way, with the desire for the four of us to play together (Hermon Mehari on trumpet, Damien Varaillon on double bass, Stéphane Adsuar on drums and percussion, and myself on piano and synthesizer). We organized several tours in Marseille in small venues (like the legendary Jam) and at friends’ places. We started out playing standards, then gradually found our own sound through original compositions.

It was after Covid that we decided to record our first self-titled album, released in 2023—it was time. A connection like that deserves to be set in stone.

We searched for a band name for a long time. During a tour in Marseille, we were staying at Damien’s father’s place and came across a book by Zéno Bianu containing a poem that read: “No beauty without silence.” We kept No Beauty, then transformed it into NO(w) Beauty, leaving room for interpretation. No Beauty is an act of resistance, refusing to accept the superficial beauty imposed by our world—immediacy, ease, prejudice. Then NO(w) Beauty redefines our idea of musical work by proposing a more intimate, truer, more singular urgency of beauty. It’s a proposition, not an injunction.

Within NO(w) Beauty, we share all responsibilities: compositions, decisions, emails, funding applications, ideas, booking. We’re greatly helped in the latter by our wonderful agent, Fanny Prevet!

(un)Seen

(un)Seen is NO(w) Beauty’s new recording. It continues the philosophical thread of the group. We enjoy playing with ambiguity, with parentheses—always proposing rather than imposing an aesthetic that wouldn’t be honest or would feel self-serving (as is often the case, in general and even in jazz).

(un)Seen is about hidden things, what we don’t perceive at first glance—those we must seek out by breaking through that initial superficial mental shell, diving inward to truly find depth in music.

Our influences are multiple. First, the powerful and deeply rooted jazz tradition. Then minimalist music, 20th-century French music, electronic music, ambient, folk… everything that can nourish us today. The sense of unity doesn’t come from the mere sum of different elements in the album, but from intention. The primary intention to create, regardless of the medium—string quartet, voice, electronics—is an original gesture that then shapes the architecture.

There is an overall vision of the album that gradually takes form during its creation. The idea of including a string quartet emerged during the recording of the quartet itself—it imposed itself naturally. We all felt it would bring something more. So we recorded the strings later, to give an added dimension to our compositions.

The song with Sam Amidon, a great folk singer (who collaborates with Bill Frisell, Bon Iver, Dijon, etc.), was an obvious choice. We wanted to collaborate with someone not strictly from the jazz world (even if the boundaries are fluid and he often plays with jazz musicians). I wrote a piece, then lyrics in French, translated into English by Hermon, specifically for Sam—who also joined us for our concert at the New Morning.

We simply put the music first, beyond aesthetics and labels—that’s what creates unity and coherence.

Interview By Franck Mediaoni.