Photo: Ernesto Rodrigues with Jassem Hindi and Guilherme Rodrigues

Introduce. The days of liner notes that merely provide a description of the music an album contains are long gone – we no longer need to be told how to listen, nor what to listen for – but when it comes to titles, hmm, maybe those words are important after all.. Ernesto Rodrigues – whose Creative Sources imprint is fast becoming one of Europe's essential labels in the domain of improvised music – could easily have chosen some gloriously rugged Portuguese sonorities and had us scurrying to our dictionaries in search of clarification, but instead has borrowed a French noun from the world of photography – "contre-plongée" translates as "low-angle shot", and the associated expression "en contre-plongée" means "from below" – and, to describe the six pieces on offer, the venerable English word "cut". Discuss. Elaborate. In the past ten years, practitioners of improvised music, finally severing the putrescent umbilical cord that attached the genre to its distant transatlantic parent, free jazz, have pushed the technique envelope of traditional acoustic instruments beyond all recognition – as if the instruments themselves have been approached from another angle altogether, as if seen from below.. Illustrate. One need merely draw up a list (woefully incomplete, at that) of standard instruments and namecheck the musicians whose furious innovation has taken them to another level altogether: trumpet (Axel Dörner, Greg Kelley, Franz Hautzinger and Matt Davis – to name but four!), trombone (Thierry Madiot..), tuba (Robin Hayward..), flute (Jim Denley..), oboe (Kyle Bruckmann..), clarinet (Kai Fagaschinski, Isabelle Duthoit..), soprano saxophone (Bhob Rainey, Alessandro Bosetti, Stéphane Rives..), violin (Mathieu Werchowski, Angharad Davies, Kazushige Kinoshita..), viola (Charlotte Hug..), cello (Martine Altenburger, Nikos Veliotis, Mark Wastell..), double bass (David Chiesa, Mike Bullock..), piano (Frédéric Blondy, Sophie Agnel, Andrea Neumann..), not to mention harp (Rhodri Davies..) and accordion (Alfredo Costa Monteiro..). And, en contre-plongée, let's add the names of Ernesto Rodrigues (violin and viola), Gerhard Uebele (violin), Guilherme Rodrigues (cello) and José Oliveira (bowed acoustic guitar and inside piano). Extend. "String quartet" needs some explanation too, then; the classical string quartet consists of two violins, viola and cello, but as Ernesto Rodrigues plays both violin and viola (though presumably not at the same time..) one could argue that the line-up here is a classical string quartet compressed into a trio. There's a wild card though, in the form of Oliveira – guitar passes as a stringed instrument, sure, but the piano is a percussion instrument, right? Conclude. Which takes us to "cut" – as in surgical intervention, or – to pursue the cinematic analogy – stop shooting: break, rethink, start again, remake, remodel. Why should the piano be a percussion instrument (one can, after all, bow those strings) and why should a violin not be a percussion instrument (it's about time we dispensed with "percussion" altogether – friction would be more appropriate..)? Cut, yes, time to take the scissors to the map, prepare a landing strip for the string quartet of the 21st century. Listen. Dan Warburton (www.paristransatlantic.com)