Denman Maroney Quintet – The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is in fact a double album, including the eponymous new proposal and Covid Variations, from 2020-21. Maroney is American and lives in France. He has been playing and composing around the piano for several decades, touching on jazz and contemporary music, which inspires him from sources such as Cage and Nancarrow, but also minimalism, from what we can hear here. 

If Covid Variations is conceived for the basic quartet featuring Maroney on hyperpiano (and compositions), Robin Fincker on tenor sax and B-flat clarinet, Scott Walton on bass and Samuel Silvant on drums, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare becomes a five-piece affair with the addition of singer Émilie Lesbros. Harmonically, and stylistically, there’s little difference between the two proposals, except that Lesbros’ voice brings a touch of lightness “à la française”, and a little strangeness in the harmonic development of the phrases, to a general canvas that seems to blend surprisingly minimalist cellular repetition and jazz.

If you know your literary history, you’ll have guessed that The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is also the title of a text by Henry Miller. Maroney used Miller to write the lyrics for the songs, but not only. Literary sources include Yeats and T.S. Eliiot.

Maroney’s style is original and intriguing. One is immediately fascinated by this unusual amalgam, which occasionally veers into atonalism and free improvisation. Lesbros’ captivating voice glues us to the eight movements of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The Covid Variations, whose ten parts immediately follow, don’t achieve the same feat. That’s because, after some 70 minutes of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare‘s sound regime, the almost 60 extra minutes of the Covid Variations feel like too much to take. Each album on its own is worthy of accolades, so I suggest you absorb this release in moderate doses. That way, you’ll be able to fully appreciate its high compositional and interpretive quality without risking aural fatigue.