I enjoyed his record of Songs from the Civil Spanish war, a repertory that interested great jazzmen from Coltrane to Charlie Haden and beyond, and his contribution to the Ibéres ad lib quartet, led by singer Gerard Jacquet (see my earlier correspondence from Nevers) but I had the chance to hear him play in that most hard of situations, solo, during the Grenoble Jazz Festival. The town in the Isere Valley has a month-long Festival with a varied and interesting program, including Ahmad Jamal, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Paolo Fresu, Henry Texier, Steve Coleman and many others, but I was able to stay just for a few days.

The midday solo concerts were held in a corner of the local FNAC, the major French chain of stores for books, records, electronics, travels and generally any form of creative entertainment; if you visit Paris don't miss the shop in the underground Halles Forum, maybe the best all-round, the Bastille shop with only records and having currently on sale for about 7 bucks the excellent Jazz in Paris series, and the Montparnasse store with a richer choice of Euro-jazz and free improvised music.A sizeable crowd turned around for all the solos, many students attracted by the informality of the situation - the concerts were free both in musical concept and in absence of ticket to be paid.

Ramon Lopez set up his drumset, quite a normal jazz instrument, and as soon as he started to play it was clear that it was indeed a drumset solo, not a percussion concert. Like Milford Graves and Han Bennink, two major antecedents, Lopez is a drummer, and doesn't need any other prop to make his solo music; unlike them, he doesn't use shamanistic chants (Graves) or comic numbers rife with musical meaning (Bennink) to complete his musical discourse.

It's a music of polyrhythms and variations, often based on the variety of sounds created with different attacks and touches on the drums and cymbals; Lopez may select a single piece of his set and start worrying it until he's satisfied that he extracted most of the sounds it can give, at that point reintroducing the rest of them in the musical flow, until there's something else that catches his fancy. It's obviously the result of a lifelong love affair with the instrument, as the palette at his disposal is anyhting but casual: rims and stands are included in the carefully selected sounds, and the drumset as a whole vibrates under his focused attention, never too loud, with a wide range of dynamics, due also to the variety of sticks and objects used to hit the instrument,and to the spare use of added sounds - shakers, castanets, a piece of plastic pipe. The attention of the hundred or so members of the audience - whose size was limited by the available shape, with several lines standing up in the back - was riveted for about an hour, and after the exhausted Lopez tried to leave the stage they demanded, and obtained, two short encores, the drummer being literally cornered on stage by the audience, with no way out.

His CDs are so far only three, all on Leo - besides the Civil War Songs there's a solo, and a duo with pianist Chistine Wodraschka - and they are as good as they come, but as it happens often with improvised music they can't convey the full impression of his live playing, functioning at best as memories of the real concert. The indelible image of Lopez drumming with what looked remarkably like a pair of oyster knives, and apparently trying with one of them to pry open the hi-hat, closed like a clam, sticks in my memory as highly symbolic of his musical research, getting deeper and deeper into the many resources of his instrument, in search of that elusive pearl (coincidentally, also a famous trap set manufacturer) hidden somewhere between all those skins and metals and woods.