I wasn’t sure how to write about Colin Vallon. The brilliant Swiss jazz pianist is one of my favorite musicians, and his new album Samares is ravishing. I wanted to describe the atmospherics, lovely melodies and deep space of Vallon and his trio. Yet there’s something much more challenging than simple background music. His record label, ECM, offered this in their p.r. material: “The signature-lyricism and melancholy of Colin Vallon’s compositions as well as his trio’s understated three-way interaction remain magically intact on Samares.” Vallon’s supported on Samares by bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Julian Sartorius.
Then Vallon provided the answer. In a recent interview the pianist explained that Samares means “winged seeds.” For Vallon it has meaning as a father and as an artist—and as a human soul. “I found it to be a beautiful image. I could relate to it being a father—the transmission of being a father, what you inherit from your past, what you want to give back. Also as an artist, spreading seeds and what you want to get back.” There’s also the idea of our lives being like seeds that come to life, “pirouette” through space and time and try “to end gracefully.”
Then I made the connection—Colin Vallon was talking about contemplation. His seed metaphor brought to mind the great Traits monk Thomas Morton’s classic work Seeds of Contemplation. Contemplation is much more than sitting in an empty room thinking about your life. It’s a challenging engagement with God. While dreamily atmospheric on songs like “Mars” and the title track “Souche,” other tracks are more challenging. “Timo” features questing piano plucking and drummer Julian Sartorius slapping what sound like a paper bag in the background. Imagine Radiohead on a jazz trip and you’ve got it.
Samares is not one of those Jazz on a Rainy Day records. There’s curiosity, disquiet, and interrogation—as well as pure beauty. The album’s closer “Brin” might seem like it’s going nowhere, but as with the rest of Samares, there’s a life pulse at the center.
In Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton has an entire chapter on what compilation is not. It is not:
“Just the affair of a quiet and passive temperament. It is not mere inertia, a tendency to inactivity, to psychic peace.”
It is “not prayerfulness, or a tendency to find peace and satisfaction in liturgical rites.”
It’s not Descartes cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. “If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being.”
It isn’t “the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of part loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Part, Race or Sect.”
It isn’t found in the superficial consciousness “where it can be observed by reflection... this reflection and this consciousness are precisely part of the external self which ‘dies’ and is cast aside like a soiled garment in the genuine awakening of the contemplative.”
It is "not the result of a certain kind of temperament. Such people exhaust themselves in trying to attain contemplation as if it were some kind of an object, like a material fortune, or a political office, or a professorship, or a prelacy.”
Merton emphasizes that the kind of anguish that can come with true contemplation is “a great gain.” Because the experience opens one up to the reality that God isn’t “a ‘what’ but ‘a pure ‘Who.’” Merton notes that this doesn’t mean that man has no concept of “the divine nature,” just that “abstract notions of the divine essence no longer play an important part since they are replaced by a concrete intuition, based on love, of God as a Person, an object of love, not a ‘nature’ or a ‘thing.’”
Vallon’s life history has contributed to a sense of real contemplation. “When I grew up classical music was playing most of the time at home, “Vallon told an interviewer. "There are a few albums of the family’s collection not belonging to this genre that somehow influenced my early years. I especially remember Eroll Garner’s piano playing, Zamphir’s pan flute and the South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo. And there was a piano at home whose keys I apparently always tried to reach as soon as I could stand.”
When Vallon was 10, he started classical training: "After a couple of years I quit classical lessons and started to play the blues. I studied blues and jazz with Marc Ueter, an excellent teacher in my hometown Yverdon. By that time I was 14 and I would already spend hours at the piano improvising freely and composing songs. It was then already clear that music would be in the center of my life. I listened to Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Nirvana and Cypress Hill with equal passion.” Vallon enrolled in Bern’s High School of Arts. “My original idea was to play standards like my jazz idols Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau but gradually my compositions replaced them in the repertoire and the band sound took a more personal turn.”
That personal turn is a beautiful prayer.