Alter Ego: Lausanne 2022

Listening to this unusual duo (the artist plays as a duo with himself), one is struck by the unprecedented coherence and truthfulness of the artistic statement. It is difficult to describe this album as original, but it is simply beautiful, unusually coherent and consistently played music with which Marc Copland gives us an insight into his inimitable inspiration in the “here and now”.

With Alter Ego: Lausanne 2022 Copland doubles down—to borrow a phrase often connected to a reprobate politician—on his solo piano mode by duetting with himself, laying down an initial track then improvising over it.

It is the same Copland sound, times two, richer and denser, but still containing a lightness, like another curtain layer of the same fabric as the first one, colorful and made of a thin fabric, hung over the original set, wafting on the same wind, not in perfect synchronicity but dancing with the same angels’ wings-like purpose.

Copland and Copland explore Thelonious Monk (“‘Round Midnight” and “Let’s Cool One”), John Coltrane (“Crescent”), Richard Rodgers (“Glad To Be Unhappy”), his old running mate Abercrombie (“Another Ralph’s”) and Ron Carter (“Eighty-One”), a couple of his originals. The sound quality is excellent (so necessary on a piano album) and Copland is in top form in front of a studio audience (sitting in for the overdubbing) not heard until the final tune, “Some Other Time,” from the pen of Leonard Bernstein.

© 2024 TCB The Montreux Jazz Label

Produced for TCB by RTS
Executive producer: Barbara Frei Schmidlin / TCB
Swiss Radio producer and consultant: Yvan Ischer / RTS

Recorded live at Studio 15, RTS-Lausanne, on September 25 & 26, 2022
Recording & mixing by Renaud Millet-Lacombe / RTS
Mastering by Kai Blankenberg at Skyline Tonfabrik
Liner notes by Yvan Ischer and Marc Copland

Cover photo by Pascal Bernheim
Inside photos by Pascal Bernheim and Yvan Ischer
Graphic artwork by Juan Carlos Villarroel & Natasja Wallenburg