Quatuor Ébène - Milestones. The Jazz Album (2024) [CD-Rip]

“The superb Quatuor Ébène has made a name for itself not only as an elegant purveyor of classical fare but also for jazz performances,” wrote the New York Times after a concert by the French ensemble which featured both a Schumann string quartet and – as an encore – Erroll Garner’s ‘Misty’, a soaringly romantic jazz classic. ‘Misty’ now features on Milestones, an album paying tribute in its title to Miles Davis and his 1958 collection of the same name, a landmark of modern jazz. Quatuor Ébène’s Milestones features reinterpretations of two Miles Davis tracks and of music by, among other jazz luminaries, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Toots Thielemans and Michel Portal. 2024 is a landmark year for Quatuor Ébène, which was founded 25 years ago at the conservatory of Boulogne-Billancourt, just outside Paris. The quartet’s first jazz-inspired album was Fiction, released in 2010. As Pierre Colombet, first violinist of the ensemble, explained: “We try to be as broad in our repertoire choices as possible … This is why it is important for us to play jazz and other styles of music … We like to be as free as possible in our performance.” 2024 also marks the departure of the cellist Raphaël Merlin, and the arrival of a new cellist, 30 year-old Yuya Okamoto. Milestones is Quatuor Ébène’s last album with the participation of Raphaël Merlin.

AllMusic Review by James Manheim
The Quatuor Ébène has recorded jazz and other vernacular music in the past, beginning on the 2010 album Fiction and continuing with such releases as Brazil and Eternal Stories. The 2024 release Milestones, named for the famous track and album by Miles Davis, is not a new experiment in the way the earlier albums were; the performances here reproduce those that the Quatuor Ébène has worked out and played in concert for some years. But it is good to have these collected in one place, inasmuch as the quartet is undergoing personnel changes in the mid-2020s. The attraction is the variety of treatments in the arrangements by the quartet's cellist, Raphaël Merlin. Many "Third Stream" fusions of jazz and classical music are animated by a single general concept, but Merlin alters his procedures in line with the nature of the original pieces, which are mostly 1950s modern jazz standards. He may offer a straightforward configuration in which the quartet substitutes for the jazz ensemble, but the group members may take solos of various kinds in more complex textures. Merlin emulates a jazz bass in Toots Thielemans' Bluesette. And in the complex opening passage of Thelonious Monk's iconic 'Round Midnight, where a straight transcription of the original would be cumbersome, Merlin substitutes registral shifts for Monk's instrument deployments. They're sensitive treatments that send one back to the jazz originals, which says a lot for them, and they comprise a fresh installment in the long and still-developing history of Third Stream music.

Tracklist
01. Dienda (Kirkland) - 3:59
02. Milestones (Davis) - 2:41
03. Bluesette (Thielemans) - 3:51
04. Misty (Garner) - 3:31
05. Fables of Faubus (Mingus) - 3:55
06. Ana Maria (Shorter) - 7:32
07. 'Round Midnight (Monk) - 5:30
08. All Blues (Davis) - 6:30
09. The Chicken (Ellis) - 4:47
10. Goodbye Pork Pie Hat (Mingus) - 6:31