In a blink and you'd miss it conversation with His Tedness Line of Duty actor Adrian Dunbar a few years ago I learnt that Dunbar was a fan of pianist Matthew Bourne. Who knew? Let's hope he gets to hear Désinances because the actor certainly has an affinity with Bourne's world as witnessed in 2014 in a Dunbar theatre performance of Words and Music, a 1961 Samuel Beckett piece initially written for radio with music by Morton Feldman performed with the great Ian McElhinney and the Crash Ensemble. With Désinances (''deductions'' in French) as a free improviser in some ways Bourne carries on the work not of Feldman but of Keith Tippett through his own vivid prismatic refractions. Released on an obscure Finnish label, the performance is as outstanding as it is deeply personal. Bourne can do fierce anger very well and you get a punkish fury and nihilistic harshness that can be quite thrilling on some of his recordings and in live performance. You also get a lot of oblique serenity, definitely here and intimations of birdsong even (the ultimate music of the universe as a companion) on 'VII'. Recorded between 2019 and 2020 at home in the Yorkshire Dales the joy of the album really begins with a beautiful chord on 'IV' and from thereon in it's like Bourne's own private Köln because you get the same solemnity, grandeur, wisdom, total capture and beyond-genre sense as you do with the Jarrett classic from the 1970s. The dichotomy between consonance and dissonance is alive and present throughout. Every bit as good it all is as Bourne's classic Montauk Variations (2012), the improviser's greatest achievement. SG
Bourne is on the same bill as Run Logan Run, World Sanguine Report and Charlotte Keeffe on Saturday in a pearl of London's east end, St John on Bethnal Green
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