Harp, swing and Christine Lutz

Christine Lutz not only has a brilliant website designed like a cellar bar.  She is also a terrific jazz harpist - I came across her CDs at the start of this season.  "La danse des écureuils" is a mixture of standards and original compositions from her quartet Harpiswing (Christine Lutz, harp, Michel Altier, double bass, Vittorio Silvestri, solo guitar, Julien Vandyck, rhythm guitar).  Her most recent album is a duo one with Michel Altier, "Le temps d'un rêve".  "La danse des écureuils" is a lovely and largely up-tempo album with a great sense of swing.  Swing's not always easy on the harp, but the combination of essentially melodic, soloistic harp  treatment brings it off beautifully here.  The all-string instrumentation of harp, bass and two guitars also creates subtle and intrieguing interactions between the instruments, without ever compromising the unity of the whole.   "Le temps d'un rêve" is a fascinating, reflective exploration of the harp and bass's different colours across a wide range of styles, from Chick Corea to Rodgers/Hart, three original compositions from Michel Altier, and "Some day my prince will come."

Christine trained classically, studying harp with Edwige Motte and harmony at the Conservatoire de Roubaix.  It was during her postgraduate studies with Marie Astrid Aufray (harp) and Christian Bellegarde (harmony) at the Conservatoire National de Région in Lille that she began to study bass:  classical, and jazz.  Three years playing in jazz clubs in and around Lille followed, such as in Lille's famous piano bar, Le Caveau de la Treille.   There she played with, among others, Harry Rajaobelison, Jean Christophe Tant, Andry and Bara Ravaloson, Clark Terry, Laurent Cugny and Jeannot Rabeson.  She also quickly became the bass player for many bands, performing with - for example - Michel Barrot, Philippe Petrucciani, Didier Lockwood, Vincent Lafont, Benoit Paillard, Sebastien Germain, Boris Pokora, and Monique Zuppardi.  In 2004, Christine began to play jazz on the harp, first including it in two trios where she played the bass.  Harpiswing was formed in 2006, "La danse des écureuils" recorded in 2006, and "Le temps d'un rêve" in 2008.

I am particularly struck by the way Christine doesn't harmonize much on either album, but rather plays the melody as a soloist, accompanying herself with a bass line or chords.  This makes the rhythm and swing comes across very strongly, and also the harp isn't hidden in the middle of the band.

"If I play more melodically it's instinctive, and also for practical reasons:  it was easier for me to hear melodies than chord progressions, and it's easier to improvise on what you can hear.  And my past as a bass player meant I was more familiar with melodic improvisation.  Most often when I improvise, another musician plays the chords, or sometimes my left hand does them.  An improvisation on chords would be more "prepared", less spontaneous for me.  But when I accompany a soloist, of course there I use the harp's harmonic aspect fully.

You can tackle jazz in two different ways: - Either in doing a huge amount of listening first of all, and in developing your ear and in directly replaying what you have heard with a band, and by taking part in jam sessions.  Nothing is written down and this method is entirely aural. - Or you join a school or take lessons to learn jazz harmony, the "rules" of improvisation, whereby you still have to listen to a lot of jazz.

In my opinion, the two methods are equally good.  For my part, after my classical harp studies, I was in a jazz club playing bass guitar and double bass for more than a year, practically every evening.  At the beginning I listened, then I had a go at playing a piece, then two, then many...given my classical background, and with a lot of practicing during the day, I was quickly taken on by ensembles for numerous concerts.  Three years later, I went to a jazz school to deepen my knowledge of jazz.  Today the theory serves me sometimes, but generally I have fun playing around with a chord sequence.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers were the first group that made me like jazz.  As a child, I was immersed in the classical world and I didn't even hear a jazz piece until I was about twenty.  When I heard these musicians, I was fascinated by the melodies of their improvisations, the beauty of their themes, the incredible swing which carried it all.  I picked out numerous bass lines by these musicians, and heard over and over how they played together, accompanied each other, how each musician responded to the others.  Today, I don't listen to these recordings so much any more, although I still like them so much.  But for example, all last year I was fascinated by Bill Evans, who I listened to non-stop:  always for the swing which I like so much, for the beauty of his phrases, the manner in which he places his left hand rhythmically alongside his right hand melodies, and the interaction he has with the different musicians he plays with."