Sylvie Courvoisier Debuts AMALTHEA Quartet Album

Pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier is set to debut her new quartet Amalthea, featuring vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Dan Weiss, on its self-titled album, out November 13, 2026 via Pyroclastic Records.

The single 'King of Hearts' was released October 2.

In Greek mythology, Amalthea is the name of the nursemaid to the infant Zeus, alternately depicted as a woman or a goat (that sort of detail can get muddled when dealing with the ancient Greek gods). In the latter form, her broken horn became the source of the cornucopia, or horn of plenty, capable of providing an endless supply of food and drink.

When the time came to decide on a name for her new quartet, the pianist and composer Sylvie Courvoisier was inspired by the abundant possibilities offered by the band's boundless musicians–vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Dan Weiss–to christen the quartet, and its self-titled debut, Amalthea. The audacious new album, out November 13, 2026 on Pyroclastic Records, overflows with daring ideas and breathtaking virtuosity.

'Patricia, Dan and Thomas are such amazing musicians,' Courvoisier says. 'Each member of this ensemble brings a distinctive voice, a strong sense of identity, and a deep commitment to improvisation. I can bring in some very complicated music and they're completely unfazed by it. It's been fun to challenge them and to challenge myself with this intricate and abundant music.'

Amalthea was formed in response to a commission from the Brooklyn performance space Roulette, with funds provided by the New York State Council on the Arts. In many of her past ensembles, Courvoisier has worked with peers and elders, often in configurations that bonded and evolved over long periods of time: her longstanding trio teams her with the veteran rhythm tandem of bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen, while her 2023 album Chimaera expanded on the trio with the addition of trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith and Nate Wooley and Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz.

With Amalthea, Courvoisier purposely set out to recruit a band of musicians who were all slightly younger than the bandleader, and with whom she had shared little prior experience. Morgan had recorded with Courvoisier on a pair of albums co-led by violinist Mark Feldman in 2010 and 2011, but the two hadn't crossed paths in the decade and a half since. Courvoisier had only played with Weiss once prior to Amalthea's debut performance at Roulette in 2024, while she had realized her chemistry with Brennan only recently, when the vibraphonist invited her to record a duo session.

The music on Amalthea is breathtaking in its ability to marry heady complexity with bracing passion, maintaining emotional expression even while navigating white-knuckle shifts in direction and tempo. The album features new compositions penned expressly for the quartet members and their seemingly limitless abilities, along with stunning reinterpretations of music recorded for Chimaera and on the trio's 2018 album D'Agala. Its elegant rigor and raw fervor are reflected in the striking cover art, a painting by the French farmer and artist Philippe Azéma. The black on orange imagery reflects Courvoisier's love of art brut, which can be traced to the Collection de l'Art Brut museum in her hometown of Lausanne.

The dazzling interplay between piano and vibes throughout the album is an expansion of Courvoisier's fascination with 'two keyboard' bands, a term that she employs loosely. The concept was in place as far back as her first ensemble, which paired her with the barrel organ player Pierre Charlal as well as recent outings for Pyroclastic like her two-piano interpretation of Stravinsky's La sacre du printemps with Cory Smythe and her duet album with guitarist Mary Halvorson, Bone Bells. 'You need two harmonic instruments to achieve the kinds of density, harmonics, complexity and bitonality that I'm looking for,' she says.

Brennan also shares Courvoisier's conservatory training, allowing for a unique blend of techniques from both modern jazz and contemporary classical traditions. Courvoisier gave herself free rein to explore those intertwined inspirations–drawing on influences like the contemporary compositions of Sofia Gubaidulina and György Ligeti–and to place arduous limitations on her bandmates that she wouldn't dare to broach with older musicians.

The age difference in the quartet lends a second meaning to the Amalthea title, drawing on its maternal resonance as a way of showing Courvoisier's interest in nurturing her younger colleagues. 'I wanted to have all new people in this band,' Courvoisier explains. 'There's a lot of written material because they're all virtuosos on their own instruments, but I also tried to leave everybody a lot of open space to express their vocabularies. And I wanted to draw inspiration from their ways of seeing the world and playing music, bringing me a new perspective on how to play my own music.'

About Sylvie Courvoisier

Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a Brooklyn-based native of Switzerland and winner of the Swiss Grand Prix and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, has earned renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the avant-jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades. Few artists feel truly at ease in both concert halls and jazz clubs, playing improvised or composed music. But Courvoisier — 'a pianist of equal parts audacity and poise,' according to The New York Times — is as compelling when performing Stravinsky's epochal Rite of Spring in league with new-music pianist Cory Smythe as she is when improvising with her own acclaimed jazz trio, featuring bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Then there are her ear-opening collaborations with such luminaries as John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Ned Rothenberg, Fred Frith, Andrew Cyrille, Mark Feldman, Christian Fennesz, Nate Wooley, and Mary Halvorson. In music as in life, Courvoisier crosses borders with a creative spirit and a free mind; her music-making is as playful as it is intense, as steeped in tradition as it is questing and intrepid.

About Pyroclastic Records

Pyroclastic Records was founded in 2016. By supporting artists in the dissemination of their work, the label empowers emerging and established artists to continue challenging conventional genre-labeling within their fields. Pyroclastic also seeks to galvanize and grow a creative community, providing opportunities, supporting diversity and expanding the audience for noncommercial art. Its albums often feature artwork by prominent visual artists—Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Charriére, Dike Blair, Raymond Pettibon and Gabriel de la Mora among recent examples.

Recent Pyroclastic projects include albums from Trio of Bloom (Craig Taborn, Nels Cline, Marcus Gilmore), Patricia Brennan, Brandon Seabrook, Simon Hanes and Yvonne Rogers.

Album Details

Sylvie Courvoisier – Amalthea

Pyroclastic Records – PR 48 – Recorded April 22, 2025

Release date November 13, 2026

sylviecourvoisier.com

pyroclasticrecords.com

pyroclasticrecords.bandcamp.com

sylviecourvoisier.bandcamp.com

Photo Credit: Veronique Hoegger