A sparkling, deep meditation on a smouldering fire, that's how you can describe the state that listening to the new album (title) by Marc Méan's trio "Field" conjures up. "Mist" is the name of the first song on the album and, as if emerging from a field of fog, the chords meander around an inner center, an inner focus, circling around it while the listener goes on an imaginary journey with them.
Méan's music lives and breathes out of the silence and takes us into a magical world of sound whose pull is hard to escape - if you have the calm and patience to engage with it, because the music of Méan's trio is unwieldy: sometimes brittle, sometimes darkly dissonant, sometimes touchingly romantic. It is music that nobody wants to like and nobody has to like. Absolutely authentic and independent, it combines the two most important adjectives for describing relevant art. And it is a blessing in the flood of pop-jazz piano trios of our time, trimmed for easy accessibility and cute virtuosity.
The multi-layered music of the trio "Fields" is co-designed by two exceptional talents of the Swiss scene: Patrice Moret on double bass and Paul Amereller on drums. Together they sound like a majestically pulsating organism and have a dark, round and warm band sound. A sound that fills the room with clouds from the first chord and sets the tone for what is to come. Méan deliberately brought the pieces on the album to rehearsals "unfinished" so that his congenial fellow musicians could actively participate in the composition process. As a result, the forms of the songs - although complex - nevertheless feel organic. Méan's improvisational language is far removed from all clichés and the boundaries between composition and improvisation are often blurred in the dense web of interplay between these three exceptional musicians. Sometimes echoes of Monk can be heard in the sparring, as in the second piece "Cold and Calm", whereby Méan's touch is closer to the lyricism of a Bill Evans, and additionally informed by his great teachers Yannick Delez, Django Bates and Søren Kjærgaard. Méan has integrated all these influences into his playing and found his own language." Mist " is an hour of music that does not lose its fascination even after repeated listenings. Even more: it gains fascination with every listen and lets you dive deep into your own inner world. (Ursus Bachthaler, September 2023)