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VanBasten
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- Inscription : 18 mai 2017, 22:59
Une autre rasade pour mars, dont un vieux concert du Genius.
Mathias Eick
Ravensburg
Mathias Eick: trumpet, voice
Håkon Aase: violin
Andreas Ulvo: piano
Audun Erlien: electric bass
Torstein Lofthus: drums
Helge Andreas Norbakken: drums, percussion
Release date: March 2, 2018
ECM 2584
B0027964-02
UPC: 6025 671 0242 7
On his last album, Midwest – described by Allaboutazz as “his most well-conceived outing” - trumpeter Mathias Eick imaginatively reflected on the exodus of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots who journeyed in the 19th century from the villages of Norway to the vast plains of Dakota. The geographical ambit of Ravensburg is smaller, but the scope of the compositions no less broad. This time Eick draws inspiration directly from his family circle, and the pieces, with modest titles like “Family”, “Friends”, “Parents”, Girlfriend” and “For My Grandmothers” add up to a kind of collective portrait, touching upon “all the emotional situations we experience on the stage where we mostly hang around. That is: home.” Embodied in the music, with its strongly melodic themes and improvisational exchanges, are ideas of relationships, dialogues, longings, games – and journeys. The Norwegian trumpeter Eick also has German ancestry, with one grandmother hailing from Ravensburg, the historic Swabian town. (Ravensburger jigsaws - “3,000 pieces, 5,000 pieces… a bit overwhelming” - were accordingly a mixed blessing of Eick family Christmases.)
“The working title for the album was just ‘Family’ says Mathias Eick, “but once I realized how many albums there are with that title, it had to change. Anyway, the starting point was a wish to create energetic rhythmic compositions where I could use both Helge Andreas Norbakken and Torstein Lofthus as two strong personalities in the family. Helge is ‘a drummer’ on paper, but he’s really a one-of-a kind musician, with a very personal approach. His drum kit doesn’t look much like a regular kit, and the sounds he draws from it are completely his own. I didn’t offer any instructions at all to him or Torstein about how they should interact or play together, because I thought they’d work it out wonderfully between themselves, even though they’re coming together for the first time here. Torstein has immaculate time and a beat that can really drive a band. So, my idea was to give him – within this idea of family and friends – a playmate, so to speak. I wasn’t trying to make the drumming bigger or louder but rather more three-dimensional. With lots of interaction and shadowing. In fact, what’s going on in the area of rhythm is very much like what’s happening between Håkon and myself, where a similar idea of shadowing and conversation and call-and-response is taking place.”
One of the pleasures of the Midwest album was hearing Mathias Eick’s radiant, vaulting trumpet supported by Gjermund Larsen’s violin; the trumpet/violin combination, a particularly evocative instrumental blend, is further developed on Ravensburg. Håkon Aase, the new violinist in Eick’s ensemble, is one of the up-and-coming players of the Norwegian scene, whom attentive ECM listeners will already know from his work with Thomas Strønen’s group Time Is A Blind Guide; latterly he has also been working with Mette Henriette. Aase has been playing with Eick in live contexts for three years already. “Gjermund did a great job on Midwest, but that was more ‘folk’ orientated. Well, I wanted some folk for this one, too, but also the jazz direction and a feeling for contemporary improvising. Håkon, who was only 22 when he started with us, has all of that in his playing – and he has really turned out to be the best possible guy for the band. He has huge ears, and I’m very happy with the level of interaction we’ve arrived at on this album.”
Bassist Audun Erlien is, with pianist Andreas Ulvo, and drummer Torstein Lofthus, a long-serving member of the Eick road band. All three of them appear on Skala, Mathias’s recording of 2009/2010, and Erlien is also on Eick’s ECM leader debut The Door (and, still earlier, he can also be heard on Nils Pettter Molvær’s Solid Ether). “Audun has a very warm sound for an electric bass player and with his background in soul and R’n’B and his true understanding of the jazz and improvised universe he brings a lot of good things to the band.” Andreas Ulvo, meanwhile, is “deepening and refining his musical expression all the time, with strong capabilities in both rhythmic playing and improvisational soloing. Obviously live and studio are two different things: when we play this material in concert, Andreas’s extended introductions often stimulate new creative ideas.”
Alongside the album’s central thematic concerns, another of Eick’s larger designs continues to unfold. On his ECM albums to date the trumpeter has been spelling out a kind of sonic calendar, with compositions named for the months of the year. With Ravensburg, “August” is added to a list that already includes “March” and “November” (on Midwest), “June” (on Skala) and “October” and “December” (on “The Door”).
“August” is one of several tracks on Ravensburg where Eick’s singing voice has a role to play. It’s a new development. “I’d been singing at home every night with the kids. Then I started singing some more while I was making music. Since I’ve always thought of the trumpet as an extension of my voice, it seemed like it might be time to also use my voice directly…”
*
Mathias Eick has won numerous awards, including the International Jazz Festival Organization’s “International Jazz Talent” prize, the Statoil Scholarship and the DNB Prize. After finishing his formal musical education at NTNU Trondheim’s jazz studies, he soon gained acclaim working with artists including Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and Chick Corea, Jaga Jazzist, Iro Haarla, Manu Katché, and Jacob Young. As trumpeter, vibraphonist, double bass player, guitarist and piano player he has performed on over 100 albums.
Ravensburg was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in June 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher, and is issued on the eve of European tour. More dates will follow in the summer, with the band reaching Ravensburg in August.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Keith Jarrett / Gary Peacock / Jack DeJohnette
After The Fall
Keith Jarrett: piano
Gary Peacock: double bass
Jack DeJohnette: drums
Release date: March 2, 2018
ECM 2590/91
B0027966-02
2-CD UPC: 6025 671 6506 4
In the course of its 30-year lifespan the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette – the group colloquially known as “the Standards trio” – made many outstanding recordings. And After The Fall, overflowing with sparkling playing and dynamic interaction, must rank with the very best of them.
“I was amazed to hear how well the music worked,” says Keith Jarrett. “For me, it’s not only a historical document, but a truly great concert.” This performance – in Newark, New Jersey in November 1998 – marked Jarrett’s return to the stage after a two-year hiatus. In fact, this concert was the first Jarrett had played since the 1996 Italian solo performances issued as A Multitude of Angels. In terms of the trio’s discography, it slots into the history before Whisper Not, recorded the following summer, and is thus the precursor of this group’s distinguished second period, where they seemed to find new freedoms both inside and beyond the world of jazz standards.
“We don’t bother with concepts, or theory, or maintaining some image,” Gary Peacock told Jazz Times a few years ago. “That’s of no concern whatsoever. So what that leaves is: everything. It leaves the music. Once you get to that point where you don’t feel like you have to make a statement anymore, you enter a space of enormous freedom.”
Together with improvising partners Peacock and DeJohnette, Jarrett glides and soars through classics of the Great American Songbook including “The Masquerade Is Over”, “Autumn Leaves”, “When I Fall In Love” and “I’ll See You Again”; they create their own music inside these familiar forms. Pete La Roca’s “One for Majid”, which would become a staple of the trio’s concerts in the 21st century, gets a sprightly treatment and sets the scene for a surprisingly boisterous, grooving version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, a chestnut which once attracted the attention of Paul Bley and Bill Evans. This in turn is followed by a rare Jarrett exploration of a Coltrane theme, as “Moment’s Notice” lifts the trio into a new energetic space.
There are also breath-taking accounts of hallowed bebop tunes including Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From The Apple”, Bud Powell’s “Bouncin’ With Bud” and Sonny Rollins’s “Doxy”. “Scrapple” is especially exhilarating, with dizzying right-hand sprays of notes from Jarrett, magically detailed by DeJohnette’s speeding cymbals, leading to rapid-fire exchanges between piano and drums. In his liner note, Jarrett reflects on the choice of material for this ‘experimental’ comeback concert. “I told the guys in the trio that for me bebop might be the best idea, although it required great technique, I didn’t think I needed to play as hard as I sometimes did…”
Ballads are also played with great tenderness. Paul Desmond’s “Late Lament” becomes a deep meditation, with Gary Peacock playing beautifully beneath Jarrett’s austere extension of the melody. “When I Fall In Love”, a favorite encore choice, is a as touching here as it has ever been.
“These songs have a soul that can be found,” Keith Jarrett once said. Few will disagree that the trio locate it, repeatedly, on After The Fall.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Jakob Bro
Returnings
Jakob Bro: guitar
Palle Mikkelborg: trumpet, flugelhorn
Thomas Morgan: double bass
Jon Christensen: drums
ECM 2546
B0028101-02
UPC: 6025 670 5850 2
“Danish guitarist Jakob Bro creates magical music, impossible to categorize”, wrote Downbeat, reviewing his album Streams. On Returnings, the magic is intensified as Bro and musical soul-mate Thomas Morgan join forces with two distinguished elders of European jazz, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and drummer Jon Christensen. It’s an inspired combination: Bro’s watercolor guitar sounds, Mikkelborg’s soft, sometimes Milesian flugelhorn, Morgan’s impeccable choice of notes, and Christensen’s free-floating drumming. These components add up to one of the prettiest and subtlest jazz albums of recent times.
The theme of “returnings” is central. The album opens with a new version of “Oktober”, picking up the story from Bro’s album Gefion. In recent years, Jakob’s trio with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron has, happily, gained a strong following. Meanwhile, the guitarist had also been looking for a context in which to continue his association with Jon Christensen. Returnings provides this. It also reunites Christensen with Palle Mikkelborg for the first time on ECM since Terje Rypal’s Vossabrygg (recorded in 2003), and marks the drummer’s return to playing after a break of more than a year.
“I never considered the first trio to be a one off”, says Bro, agreeing that bassist Morgan plays differently with Christensen than in the group with Joey Baron. “In some ways Thomas is a very socially-skilled bass player! He’s picking up on Jon’s ideas, he’s making the melody sound better and he’s also accompanying each of us in the improvised sections. It’s incredible what he does simultaneously.”
Bro has admired Palle Mikkelborg’s playing for as long as he can remember. “I’ve known Palle since I was a kid,” he says. “I was playing trumpet myself, then, and listening to him a lot.” Both musicians live in Copenhagen, “and the scene is quite small, so we’ve crossed paths quite often. A few years ago, we were talking about collaborating on a large-scale music for choir. Then we decided to concentrate first on more improvised music. So I called Jon and Thomas and invited them to play with us. We did two concerts together with this formation in 2014 which really made me think about the potential. And Palle and I would meet, talk, drink wine and play a bit every few weeks, and gradually ideas for the album came together.”
Working towards the music for this session, Bro and Mikkelborg began with the title track. “The main part of that is Palle’s. He had come up with a composition based on the letters ECM and Manfred Eicher’s name – similar in a way to his composition ‘Aura’ that he’d done for Miles Davis - almost a mathematical construction. We started improvising on that and developing it and it became, I think, an essential part of the program.” It seems to contain flashes of ECM history in its source code, and the way that Christensen and Palle Mikkelborg interact and overlap here is likely to make older listeners and scholars recall the tonalities and textures of 1970s albums like Waves and Descendre. Nonetheless, following Christensen’s free drumming, and the independence of the four voices moving in the transparent mix, leaves a deeper impression of music both modern and timeless.
“I think it’s both fragile and strong at the same time,” says Bro of the music’s contrasting attributes, “and I love the way Jon very often won’t give you the obvious stressed rhythm you might expect. When Palle is playing strong lines, Jon is heading somewhere else in his own way. To my ears that’s really interesting.”
For playing the unexpected in a jazz context, Jon Christensen has few rivals, though one of them would have been the late Paul Motian, erstwhile employer of both Bro and Morgan. The piece “Hamsun” here, dedicated to the Norwegian author of such classics as Hunger and Mysteries, was also partly inspired by Motian. “Paul Motian had talked a lot about Knut Hamsun when we toured together, and that got me reading the books…This is an older piece which I’d written originally for Kenny Wheeler to play.” The version of the tune on Returnings is played as a duet by Bro and Morgan.
Mikkelborg’s piece “View” begins with Christensen and Morgan in duo, with Palle and Jakob introducing the theme only after the halfway mark. Bro: “This is really a collaborative album, the outcome of a creative session with good input from everybody. Musically, any one of us could be considered the ‘leader’.”
One of the most touching pieces is “Song for Nicolai”, for Danish bassist Nicolai Munch-Hansen, who passed away last year, with soulful playing from both Mikkelborg and Bro.
“Oktober” was included at the suggestion of Manfred Eicher. “It’s also a piece that Palle likes to play, and at the mixing stage it was becoming clear that this version had a special character.” The tune “Lyskaster”, also heard on Gefion, is dedicated to the memory of Jakob Bro’s father. “On Gefion, we had just touched the melody [in a version more spacious and textural]. Here, Palle and I play it together, and that felt good. Also, my father was a trumpet player, too, and liked Palle’s sound. So, I was thinking about that as well.”
Returnings was recorded in July 2016 at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher. Further ECM projects with Jakob Bro are in preparation. Next up: a live album with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron, recorded in New York.
The Bro/Mikklelborg/Morgan/Christensen quartet will be playing some of the festivals this summer, including the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. More details soon.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Arild Andersen/Paolo Vinaccia/Tommy Smith
In-House Science
Arild Andersen: double-bass
Paolo Vinaccia: drums
Tommy Smith: tenor saxophone
Release date : March 23rd 2018
ECM 2594
B0028100-02
UPC: 6025 671 6897 3
Norwegian master bassist Arild Andersen’s trio with big-toned Scottish tenorist Tommy Smith and Italian-born powerhouse drummer Paolo Vinaccia is one of the most viscerally exciting jazz small groups of the present moment. Some of its energies are arguably best captured in a live context, and here the three musicians deliver a characteristically smoking performance, recorded at the PKS Villa Rothstein in Bad Ischl, Austria, September 2016.
The trio’s earlier concert recording, Live At Belleville, was issued a decade ago to rave reviews and a shower of awards. “Absolutely and unreservedly marvellous” said the BBC Music Magazine. “How often do just three musicians produce music as vast and panoramic in its scale and vision?” asked Jazzwise rhetorically.
In recent interviews, Andersen has reflected on the group’s work method. “In the trio everyone is equal. Tommy might play the melody instrument, but he can also be an accompanist, and Paolo and I are the rhythm section but either of us can also be the lead voice… We are all soloists or rhythm section, the three of us simultaneously. It’s all to do with interplay, and as a trio we have developed quite a chemistry. Tommy is very good at listening to the bass and drums when he plays solo, and he leaves spaces for us to come up front again.” This is evident throughout this program of Andersen compositions, and not least on the album’s longest track “Science” which flies forth at breakneck tempo and keeps changing its angle of attack. Smith’s iron grip on its swerving rhythms is as profound as that of his partners and Andersen, equally, is as eloquent a soloist as the outstanding saxophonist.
“Mira” was the title track of the trio’s studio album of 2014, originally conceived by Arild as a “Sunday morning album”. It opens In-House Science, transformed by the momentum of the night-time live performance. The same goes for “Blussy”, already powerful in the studio version, it is elevated to a new level of intensity in the rivetingly dynamic performance here, capped by overblown saxophone.
Andersen’s commitment to burning energy music is of course not a new development but a continuation: in the early 1970s he played urgent streams-of-sound music in sax/bass/drum trios with Sam Rivers and Barry Altschul, with Juhani Aaltonen and Edward Vesala, and with Jan Garbarek and Vesala (see Triptkyon). The trio with Smith and Vinaccia extends this distinguished tradition on its own terms.
“North of the North Wind”, thematically connected to an earlier Andersen cycle – refer to the 1997 release Hyperborean – begins with Arild playing his bass together with a sampler to create rich quasi-orchestral sonorities before Smith enters and the piece drifts into free ballad territory, with moving statements from tenor sax and double bass.
“In-House”, in its full-throated exultation a sort of partner piece to “Outhouse” on the Live AtBelleville set, brings the album to a triumphant close, incorporating along the way solos by each of the trio members.
As well as bracketing two song-titles together, album title In-House Science alludes to the venue where this fiery music was documented, the PKS Villa Rothstein, whose history has a connection to scientific inquiry, the “PKS” standing for Pythagorus Kepler System. The PKS Organization is devoted to furthering the study of natural energy as outlined by Viktor Schauburger and other unconventional researchers.
The launch of In-House Science is celebrated with concerts in Japan, where the trio is joined by guest pianist Makoto Ozone for performances in Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.
*
Arild Andersen was born in Oslo in 1945. He has been an ECM artist for almost 50 years, first recording for the label in 1970 on Afric Pepperbird with Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen. In the same period, he worked with Scandinavian residents Don Cherry and George Russell and backed a long line of visiting Americans – from Sonny Rollins to Chick Corea. After a New York sojourn in the early 1970s that found him working with Sam Rivers, Paul Bley, Steve Kuhn and Sheila Jordan, he returned to Norway and began leading his own bands. His first ECM leader dates were revisited in the 2010 box set Green In Blue: Early Quartets. Arild Andersen has issued more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader for ECM, along the way making listeners aware of talents including Jon Balke, Tore Brunborg, Nils Petter Molvaer and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, all of whom first came to international attention as young musicians with Andersen bands. In 2008 he received the Jazz Musician of the Year award from France’s Académie du Jazz.
Paolo Vinaccia was born in Italy in 1954, and has been based in Norway since 1979. He has toured and recorded with musicians including Terje Rypdal, Jon Christensen, Bendik Hofseth, Ketil Bjørnstad, Palle Mikkelborg, David Darling, Dhafer Youssef, Mike Mainieri and many others. On ECM he appears on Terje Rypdal’s Crime Scene, Vossabrygg, and Skywardsalbums, as well as Arild Andersen’s Hyperborean, Electra and Live at Belleville. Releases under his own name include the live box set Very Much Alive (Jazzland, 2010) with Rypdal, Mikkelborg, Wesseltoft and Ståle Storløkken.
Saxophonist Tommy Smith, born in Edinburgh in 1967, made his mark on the Scottish jazz scene with his first album Giant Strides, recorded when he was sixteen, in 1983. That same year he won a scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, he formed the group Forward Motion, and also joined Gary Burton’s band, with which he appeared on the ECM album Whiz Kids in 1986. He has since released more than twenty albums under his own name for numerous labels, including his own Spartacus imprint. Smith has worked in small groups and big bands, recording and touring with Joe Lovano, David Liebman, Benny Golson, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Tommy Flanagan, John Scofield, Miroslav Vitous, Jack DeJohnette and many more. He has composed for and performed with classical orchestras and ensembles including the Orchestra of St. John's Square, the Scottish Ensemble, the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra and the Paragon Ensemble. Smith founded the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra in 1995, and remains its director. The orchestra is heard on the ECM album Celebration, with Arild Andersen as principal soloist.
Mathias Eick
Ravensburg
Mathias Eick: trumpet, voice
Håkon Aase: violin
Andreas Ulvo: piano
Audun Erlien: electric bass
Torstein Lofthus: drums
Helge Andreas Norbakken: drums, percussion
Release date: March 2, 2018
ECM 2584
B0027964-02
UPC: 6025 671 0242 7
On his last album, Midwest – described by Allaboutazz as “his most well-conceived outing” - trumpeter Mathias Eick imaginatively reflected on the exodus of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots who journeyed in the 19th century from the villages of Norway to the vast plains of Dakota. The geographical ambit of Ravensburg is smaller, but the scope of the compositions no less broad. This time Eick draws inspiration directly from his family circle, and the pieces, with modest titles like “Family”, “Friends”, “Parents”, Girlfriend” and “For My Grandmothers” add up to a kind of collective portrait, touching upon “all the emotional situations we experience on the stage where we mostly hang around. That is: home.” Embodied in the music, with its strongly melodic themes and improvisational exchanges, are ideas of relationships, dialogues, longings, games – and journeys. The Norwegian trumpeter Eick also has German ancestry, with one grandmother hailing from Ravensburg, the historic Swabian town. (Ravensburger jigsaws - “3,000 pieces, 5,000 pieces… a bit overwhelming” - were accordingly a mixed blessing of Eick family Christmases.)
“The working title for the album was just ‘Family’ says Mathias Eick, “but once I realized how many albums there are with that title, it had to change. Anyway, the starting point was a wish to create energetic rhythmic compositions where I could use both Helge Andreas Norbakken and Torstein Lofthus as two strong personalities in the family. Helge is ‘a drummer’ on paper, but he’s really a one-of-a kind musician, with a very personal approach. His drum kit doesn’t look much like a regular kit, and the sounds he draws from it are completely his own. I didn’t offer any instructions at all to him or Torstein about how they should interact or play together, because I thought they’d work it out wonderfully between themselves, even though they’re coming together for the first time here. Torstein has immaculate time and a beat that can really drive a band. So, my idea was to give him – within this idea of family and friends – a playmate, so to speak. I wasn’t trying to make the drumming bigger or louder but rather more three-dimensional. With lots of interaction and shadowing. In fact, what’s going on in the area of rhythm is very much like what’s happening between Håkon and myself, where a similar idea of shadowing and conversation and call-and-response is taking place.”
One of the pleasures of the Midwest album was hearing Mathias Eick’s radiant, vaulting trumpet supported by Gjermund Larsen’s violin; the trumpet/violin combination, a particularly evocative instrumental blend, is further developed on Ravensburg. Håkon Aase, the new violinist in Eick’s ensemble, is one of the up-and-coming players of the Norwegian scene, whom attentive ECM listeners will already know from his work with Thomas Strønen’s group Time Is A Blind Guide; latterly he has also been working with Mette Henriette. Aase has been playing with Eick in live contexts for three years already. “Gjermund did a great job on Midwest, but that was more ‘folk’ orientated. Well, I wanted some folk for this one, too, but also the jazz direction and a feeling for contemporary improvising. Håkon, who was only 22 when he started with us, has all of that in his playing – and he has really turned out to be the best possible guy for the band. He has huge ears, and I’m very happy with the level of interaction we’ve arrived at on this album.”
Bassist Audun Erlien is, with pianist Andreas Ulvo, and drummer Torstein Lofthus, a long-serving member of the Eick road band. All three of them appear on Skala, Mathias’s recording of 2009/2010, and Erlien is also on Eick’s ECM leader debut The Door (and, still earlier, he can also be heard on Nils Pettter Molvær’s Solid Ether). “Audun has a very warm sound for an electric bass player and with his background in soul and R’n’B and his true understanding of the jazz and improvised universe he brings a lot of good things to the band.” Andreas Ulvo, meanwhile, is “deepening and refining his musical expression all the time, with strong capabilities in both rhythmic playing and improvisational soloing. Obviously live and studio are two different things: when we play this material in concert, Andreas’s extended introductions often stimulate new creative ideas.”
Alongside the album’s central thematic concerns, another of Eick’s larger designs continues to unfold. On his ECM albums to date the trumpeter has been spelling out a kind of sonic calendar, with compositions named for the months of the year. With Ravensburg, “August” is added to a list that already includes “March” and “November” (on Midwest), “June” (on Skala) and “October” and “December” (on “The Door”).
“August” is one of several tracks on Ravensburg where Eick’s singing voice has a role to play. It’s a new development. “I’d been singing at home every night with the kids. Then I started singing some more while I was making music. Since I’ve always thought of the trumpet as an extension of my voice, it seemed like it might be time to also use my voice directly…”
*
Mathias Eick has won numerous awards, including the International Jazz Festival Organization’s “International Jazz Talent” prize, the Statoil Scholarship and the DNB Prize. After finishing his formal musical education at NTNU Trondheim’s jazz studies, he soon gained acclaim working with artists including Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and Chick Corea, Jaga Jazzist, Iro Haarla, Manu Katché, and Jacob Young. As trumpeter, vibraphonist, double bass player, guitarist and piano player he has performed on over 100 albums.
Ravensburg was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in June 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher, and is issued on the eve of European tour. More dates will follow in the summer, with the band reaching Ravensburg in August.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Keith Jarrett / Gary Peacock / Jack DeJohnette
After The Fall
Keith Jarrett: piano
Gary Peacock: double bass
Jack DeJohnette: drums
Release date: March 2, 2018
ECM 2590/91
B0027966-02
2-CD UPC: 6025 671 6506 4
In the course of its 30-year lifespan the trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette – the group colloquially known as “the Standards trio” – made many outstanding recordings. And After The Fall, overflowing with sparkling playing and dynamic interaction, must rank with the very best of them.
“I was amazed to hear how well the music worked,” says Keith Jarrett. “For me, it’s not only a historical document, but a truly great concert.” This performance – in Newark, New Jersey in November 1998 – marked Jarrett’s return to the stage after a two-year hiatus. In fact, this concert was the first Jarrett had played since the 1996 Italian solo performances issued as A Multitude of Angels. In terms of the trio’s discography, it slots into the history before Whisper Not, recorded the following summer, and is thus the precursor of this group’s distinguished second period, where they seemed to find new freedoms both inside and beyond the world of jazz standards.
“We don’t bother with concepts, or theory, or maintaining some image,” Gary Peacock told Jazz Times a few years ago. “That’s of no concern whatsoever. So what that leaves is: everything. It leaves the music. Once you get to that point where you don’t feel like you have to make a statement anymore, you enter a space of enormous freedom.”
Together with improvising partners Peacock and DeJohnette, Jarrett glides and soars through classics of the Great American Songbook including “The Masquerade Is Over”, “Autumn Leaves”, “When I Fall In Love” and “I’ll See You Again”; they create their own music inside these familiar forms. Pete La Roca’s “One for Majid”, which would become a staple of the trio’s concerts in the 21st century, gets a sprightly treatment and sets the scene for a surprisingly boisterous, grooving version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”, a chestnut which once attracted the attention of Paul Bley and Bill Evans. This in turn is followed by a rare Jarrett exploration of a Coltrane theme, as “Moment’s Notice” lifts the trio into a new energetic space.
There are also breath-taking accounts of hallowed bebop tunes including Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple From The Apple”, Bud Powell’s “Bouncin’ With Bud” and Sonny Rollins’s “Doxy”. “Scrapple” is especially exhilarating, with dizzying right-hand sprays of notes from Jarrett, magically detailed by DeJohnette’s speeding cymbals, leading to rapid-fire exchanges between piano and drums. In his liner note, Jarrett reflects on the choice of material for this ‘experimental’ comeback concert. “I told the guys in the trio that for me bebop might be the best idea, although it required great technique, I didn’t think I needed to play as hard as I sometimes did…”
Ballads are also played with great tenderness. Paul Desmond’s “Late Lament” becomes a deep meditation, with Gary Peacock playing beautifully beneath Jarrett’s austere extension of the melody. “When I Fall In Love”, a favorite encore choice, is a as touching here as it has ever been.
“These songs have a soul that can be found,” Keith Jarrett once said. Few will disagree that the trio locate it, repeatedly, on After The Fall.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Jakob Bro
Returnings
Jakob Bro: guitar
Palle Mikkelborg: trumpet, flugelhorn
Thomas Morgan: double bass
Jon Christensen: drums
ECM 2546
B0028101-02
UPC: 6025 670 5850 2
“Danish guitarist Jakob Bro creates magical music, impossible to categorize”, wrote Downbeat, reviewing his album Streams. On Returnings, the magic is intensified as Bro and musical soul-mate Thomas Morgan join forces with two distinguished elders of European jazz, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and drummer Jon Christensen. It’s an inspired combination: Bro’s watercolor guitar sounds, Mikkelborg’s soft, sometimes Milesian flugelhorn, Morgan’s impeccable choice of notes, and Christensen’s free-floating drumming. These components add up to one of the prettiest and subtlest jazz albums of recent times.
The theme of “returnings” is central. The album opens with a new version of “Oktober”, picking up the story from Bro’s album Gefion. In recent years, Jakob’s trio with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron has, happily, gained a strong following. Meanwhile, the guitarist had also been looking for a context in which to continue his association with Jon Christensen. Returnings provides this. It also reunites Christensen with Palle Mikkelborg for the first time on ECM since Terje Rypal’s Vossabrygg (recorded in 2003), and marks the drummer’s return to playing after a break of more than a year.
“I never considered the first trio to be a one off”, says Bro, agreeing that bassist Morgan plays differently with Christensen than in the group with Joey Baron. “In some ways Thomas is a very socially-skilled bass player! He’s picking up on Jon’s ideas, he’s making the melody sound better and he’s also accompanying each of us in the improvised sections. It’s incredible what he does simultaneously.”
Bro has admired Palle Mikkelborg’s playing for as long as he can remember. “I’ve known Palle since I was a kid,” he says. “I was playing trumpet myself, then, and listening to him a lot.” Both musicians live in Copenhagen, “and the scene is quite small, so we’ve crossed paths quite often. A few years ago, we were talking about collaborating on a large-scale music for choir. Then we decided to concentrate first on more improvised music. So I called Jon and Thomas and invited them to play with us. We did two concerts together with this formation in 2014 which really made me think about the potential. And Palle and I would meet, talk, drink wine and play a bit every few weeks, and gradually ideas for the album came together.”
Working towards the music for this session, Bro and Mikkelborg began with the title track. “The main part of that is Palle’s. He had come up with a composition based on the letters ECM and Manfred Eicher’s name – similar in a way to his composition ‘Aura’ that he’d done for Miles Davis - almost a mathematical construction. We started improvising on that and developing it and it became, I think, an essential part of the program.” It seems to contain flashes of ECM history in its source code, and the way that Christensen and Palle Mikkelborg interact and overlap here is likely to make older listeners and scholars recall the tonalities and textures of 1970s albums like Waves and Descendre. Nonetheless, following Christensen’s free drumming, and the independence of the four voices moving in the transparent mix, leaves a deeper impression of music both modern and timeless.
“I think it’s both fragile and strong at the same time,” says Bro of the music’s contrasting attributes, “and I love the way Jon very often won’t give you the obvious stressed rhythm you might expect. When Palle is playing strong lines, Jon is heading somewhere else in his own way. To my ears that’s really interesting.”
For playing the unexpected in a jazz context, Jon Christensen has few rivals, though one of them would have been the late Paul Motian, erstwhile employer of both Bro and Morgan. The piece “Hamsun” here, dedicated to the Norwegian author of such classics as Hunger and Mysteries, was also partly inspired by Motian. “Paul Motian had talked a lot about Knut Hamsun when we toured together, and that got me reading the books…This is an older piece which I’d written originally for Kenny Wheeler to play.” The version of the tune on Returnings is played as a duet by Bro and Morgan.
Mikkelborg’s piece “View” begins with Christensen and Morgan in duo, with Palle and Jakob introducing the theme only after the halfway mark. Bro: “This is really a collaborative album, the outcome of a creative session with good input from everybody. Musically, any one of us could be considered the ‘leader’.”
One of the most touching pieces is “Song for Nicolai”, for Danish bassist Nicolai Munch-Hansen, who passed away last year, with soulful playing from both Mikkelborg and Bro.
“Oktober” was included at the suggestion of Manfred Eicher. “It’s also a piece that Palle likes to play, and at the mixing stage it was becoming clear that this version had a special character.” The tune “Lyskaster”, also heard on Gefion, is dedicated to the memory of Jakob Bro’s father. “On Gefion, we had just touched the melody [in a version more spacious and textural]. Here, Palle and I play it together, and that felt good. Also, my father was a trumpet player, too, and liked Palle’s sound. So, I was thinking about that as well.”
Returnings was recorded in July 2016 at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher. Further ECM projects with Jakob Bro are in preparation. Next up: a live album with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron, recorded in New York.
The Bro/Mikklelborg/Morgan/Christensen quartet will be playing some of the festivals this summer, including the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. More details soon.
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Arild Andersen/Paolo Vinaccia/Tommy Smith
In-House Science
Arild Andersen: double-bass
Paolo Vinaccia: drums
Tommy Smith: tenor saxophone
Release date : March 23rd 2018
ECM 2594
B0028100-02
UPC: 6025 671 6897 3
Norwegian master bassist Arild Andersen’s trio with big-toned Scottish tenorist Tommy Smith and Italian-born powerhouse drummer Paolo Vinaccia is one of the most viscerally exciting jazz small groups of the present moment. Some of its energies are arguably best captured in a live context, and here the three musicians deliver a characteristically smoking performance, recorded at the PKS Villa Rothstein in Bad Ischl, Austria, September 2016.
The trio’s earlier concert recording, Live At Belleville, was issued a decade ago to rave reviews and a shower of awards. “Absolutely and unreservedly marvellous” said the BBC Music Magazine. “How often do just three musicians produce music as vast and panoramic in its scale and vision?” asked Jazzwise rhetorically.
In recent interviews, Andersen has reflected on the group’s work method. “In the trio everyone is equal. Tommy might play the melody instrument, but he can also be an accompanist, and Paolo and I are the rhythm section but either of us can also be the lead voice… We are all soloists or rhythm section, the three of us simultaneously. It’s all to do with interplay, and as a trio we have developed quite a chemistry. Tommy is very good at listening to the bass and drums when he plays solo, and he leaves spaces for us to come up front again.” This is evident throughout this program of Andersen compositions, and not least on the album’s longest track “Science” which flies forth at breakneck tempo and keeps changing its angle of attack. Smith’s iron grip on its swerving rhythms is as profound as that of his partners and Andersen, equally, is as eloquent a soloist as the outstanding saxophonist.
“Mira” was the title track of the trio’s studio album of 2014, originally conceived by Arild as a “Sunday morning album”. It opens In-House Science, transformed by the momentum of the night-time live performance. The same goes for “Blussy”, already powerful in the studio version, it is elevated to a new level of intensity in the rivetingly dynamic performance here, capped by overblown saxophone.
Andersen’s commitment to burning energy music is of course not a new development but a continuation: in the early 1970s he played urgent streams-of-sound music in sax/bass/drum trios with Sam Rivers and Barry Altschul, with Juhani Aaltonen and Edward Vesala, and with Jan Garbarek and Vesala (see Triptkyon). The trio with Smith and Vinaccia extends this distinguished tradition on its own terms.
“North of the North Wind”, thematically connected to an earlier Andersen cycle – refer to the 1997 release Hyperborean – begins with Arild playing his bass together with a sampler to create rich quasi-orchestral sonorities before Smith enters and the piece drifts into free ballad territory, with moving statements from tenor sax and double bass.
“In-House”, in its full-throated exultation a sort of partner piece to “Outhouse” on the Live AtBelleville set, brings the album to a triumphant close, incorporating along the way solos by each of the trio members.
As well as bracketing two song-titles together, album title In-House Science alludes to the venue where this fiery music was documented, the PKS Villa Rothstein, whose history has a connection to scientific inquiry, the “PKS” standing for Pythagorus Kepler System. The PKS Organization is devoted to furthering the study of natural energy as outlined by Viktor Schauburger and other unconventional researchers.
The launch of In-House Science is celebrated with concerts in Japan, where the trio is joined by guest pianist Makoto Ozone for performances in Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.
*
Arild Andersen was born in Oslo in 1945. He has been an ECM artist for almost 50 years, first recording for the label in 1970 on Afric Pepperbird with Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen. In the same period, he worked with Scandinavian residents Don Cherry and George Russell and backed a long line of visiting Americans – from Sonny Rollins to Chick Corea. After a New York sojourn in the early 1970s that found him working with Sam Rivers, Paul Bley, Steve Kuhn and Sheila Jordan, he returned to Norway and began leading his own bands. His first ECM leader dates were revisited in the 2010 box set Green In Blue: Early Quartets. Arild Andersen has issued more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader for ECM, along the way making listeners aware of talents including Jon Balke, Tore Brunborg, Nils Petter Molvaer and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, all of whom first came to international attention as young musicians with Andersen bands. In 2008 he received the Jazz Musician of the Year award from France’s Académie du Jazz.
Paolo Vinaccia was born in Italy in 1954, and has been based in Norway since 1979. He has toured and recorded with musicians including Terje Rypdal, Jon Christensen, Bendik Hofseth, Ketil Bjørnstad, Palle Mikkelborg, David Darling, Dhafer Youssef, Mike Mainieri and many others. On ECM he appears on Terje Rypdal’s Crime Scene, Vossabrygg, and Skywardsalbums, as well as Arild Andersen’s Hyperborean, Electra and Live at Belleville. Releases under his own name include the live box set Very Much Alive (Jazzland, 2010) with Rypdal, Mikkelborg, Wesseltoft and Ståle Storløkken.
Saxophonist Tommy Smith, born in Edinburgh in 1967, made his mark on the Scottish jazz scene with his first album Giant Strides, recorded when he was sixteen, in 1983. That same year he won a scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, he formed the group Forward Motion, and also joined Gary Burton’s band, with which he appeared on the ECM album Whiz Kids in 1986. He has since released more than twenty albums under his own name for numerous labels, including his own Spartacus imprint. Smith has worked in small groups and big bands, recording and touring with Joe Lovano, David Liebman, Benny Golson, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Tommy Flanagan, John Scofield, Miroslav Vitous, Jack DeJohnette and many more. He has composed for and performed with classical orchestras and ensembles including the Orchestra of St. John's Square, the Scottish Ensemble, the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra and the Paragon Ensemble. Smith founded the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra in 1995, and remains its director. The orchestra is heard on the ECM album Celebration, with Arild Andersen as principal soloist.
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Prochaines sorties
Kristjan Randalu - Absence
release date April 6, 2018
Kristjan Randalu: piano; Ben Monder: guitar; Markku Ounaskari: drums
Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu makes his ECM debut with a striking album of his own rigorous-yet-lyrical music, sensitively played by a trio formed especially for this recording, with American guitarist Ben Monder and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari. As an improviser of prodigious technique, once described by Herbie Hancock as "a dazzling piano player", Randalu's affinities are with the jazz musicians, but the forms and dynamics of his pieces also reflect a discerning sense of structure, and he has cited composers Erkki-Sven Tüür and Tõnu Kõrvitz amongst his mentors. Absence was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France in July 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
ECM
Kristjan Randalu
Absence
Kristjan Randalu: piano
Ben Monder: guitar
Markku Ounaskari: drums
Released date: April 6, 2018
ECM 2586
B0028128-02
UPC: 6025 672 2679 6
Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu makes his ECM debut with a striking album of his own rigorous-yet-lyrical music, sensitively played by a group formed especially for this recording, with American guitarist Ben Monder and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari. The trio line-up was suggested by producer Manfred Eicher after hearing Randalu’s 2012 duo recording with Monder, Equilibrium. The featured compositions on Absence are robust, and in the past Randalu has played them also as solo piano pieces. In this session recorded in Pernes-les-Fontaines in the south of France, their structures are prised open. Guitar and drums subtly illuminate the pieces from inside, casting light on their originality. Among other attributes, Monder and Ounaskari are outstanding colorists and textural players, and they bring out much of the fine detail implied in Randalu’s writing with inspired improvising.
Like much good music, Randalu’s resists capsule summary. Markku Ounaskari has observed that “Kristjan’s music is really a world of its own.” As an improviser of prodigious technique, once described by Herbie Hancock as “a dazzling piano player”, Randalu’s affinities are with the jazz musicians, but the forms and dynamics of his pieces also reflect a discerning structural sense, and he has cited composers Erkki-Sven Tüür and Tõnu Kõrvits among his mentors. Kristjan Randalu’s capacity to move between genres and disciplines is rare: his itinerary in recent months, for instance, has found him premiering new music of his own with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, performing Arvo Pärt’s Credo with Kristjan Järvi and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, and also playing duets with Dave Liebman. There are not many contemporary players with this kind of range.
Born into a musical family in Estonia in 1978, Randalu grew up in Germany. Both his parents are professional classical pianists, and all of his early music training was purely classical. Hearing Chick Corea’s Inside Out at the age of 13 changed some of his priorities: “It seemed to me so perfect that I thought at first that it must be all notated. And it had all this rhythmic energy, and sound-wise, harmonically and colour-wise was very interesting to me. At that point I had almost no historical jazz references at all - no early Miles, even, no Coltrane – I would learn about all of that later. But I felt motivated to create my own music with piano and synthesizer and sequencer and soon had my first band. By this point I had already been performing classical music for years and was playing at a serious level, but there was a gap between practicing my Liszt and Chopin and beginning to deal actively with jazz…” The gap was bridged in the following years by studies with a number of notable pianists, including John Taylor and Django Bates. A scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music allowed plenty of opportunities to hear New York’s improvisers at first hand, Ben Monder amongst them.
“Later it happened on a couple of occasions that our groups – Ben’s group and my group -- played one after the other at festivals in Germany and we talked several times about doing something together. But it didn’t happen until a festival organizer in Estonia proposed a duo concert….”
Markku Ounaskari and Kristjan Randalu first played opposite each other in a concert series organized by German radio station NDR. Ounaskari was then playing with the second edition of his Kuára group with Trygve Seim on saxes. When Seim formed his Helsinki Songs project a couple of years later, he invited both Ounaskari and Randalu to be part of it (an ECM album with Seim, Randalu, Ounaskari and Mats Eilertsen is in preparation).
Ounaskari has played with all the major Finnish jazz players and with many international jazz musicians including Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler, Tomasz Stanko and Marc Ducret. In addition to his Kuára recording with Samuli Mikkonen and Per Jørgensen, exploring Russian psalms and Finno-Ugrian folk songs in an improvisational context, Markku Ounaskari appears on several ECM recordings with folk singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland, including Starflowers, The Land That Is Not, The Half-Finished Heaven and The Magical Forest.
A musician in the New York City area for over 30 years, Ben Monder has performed with a wide variety of artists, including Jack McDuff, Marc Johnson, Lee Konitz, Billy Childs, Andrew Cyrille, George Garzone, Paul Motian, Maria Schneider, and Marshall Crenshaw. He also contributed guitar parts to the final David Bowie album, Blackstar. In addition to his own ECM album Amorphae, with Paul Motian, Andrew Cyrille and Pete Rende, Monder appears on Theo Bleckmann’s Elegy and Paul Motian’s Garden of Eden.
The Absence trio is touring in April and May. For details consult Kristjan’s web site www.randalu.com
Absence was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in July 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Kristjan Randalu - Absence
release date April 6, 2018
Kristjan Randalu: piano; Ben Monder: guitar; Markku Ounaskari: drums
Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu makes his ECM debut with a striking album of his own rigorous-yet-lyrical music, sensitively played by a trio formed especially for this recording, with American guitarist Ben Monder and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari. As an improviser of prodigious technique, once described by Herbie Hancock as "a dazzling piano player", Randalu's affinities are with the jazz musicians, but the forms and dynamics of his pieces also reflect a discerning sense of structure, and he has cited composers Erkki-Sven Tüür and Tõnu Kõrvitz amongst his mentors. Absence was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France in July 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
ECM
Kristjan Randalu
Absence
Kristjan Randalu: piano
Ben Monder: guitar
Markku Ounaskari: drums
Released date: April 6, 2018
ECM 2586
B0028128-02
UPC: 6025 672 2679 6
Estonian pianist Kristjan Randalu makes his ECM debut with a striking album of his own rigorous-yet-lyrical music, sensitively played by a group formed especially for this recording, with American guitarist Ben Monder and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari. The trio line-up was suggested by producer Manfred Eicher after hearing Randalu’s 2012 duo recording with Monder, Equilibrium. The featured compositions on Absence are robust, and in the past Randalu has played them also as solo piano pieces. In this session recorded in Pernes-les-Fontaines in the south of France, their structures are prised open. Guitar and drums subtly illuminate the pieces from inside, casting light on their originality. Among other attributes, Monder and Ounaskari are outstanding colorists and textural players, and they bring out much of the fine detail implied in Randalu’s writing with inspired improvising.
Like much good music, Randalu’s resists capsule summary. Markku Ounaskari has observed that “Kristjan’s music is really a world of its own.” As an improviser of prodigious technique, once described by Herbie Hancock as “a dazzling piano player”, Randalu’s affinities are with the jazz musicians, but the forms and dynamics of his pieces also reflect a discerning structural sense, and he has cited composers Erkki-Sven Tüür and Tõnu Kõrvits among his mentors. Kristjan Randalu’s capacity to move between genres and disciplines is rare: his itinerary in recent months, for instance, has found him premiering new music of his own with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, performing Arvo Pärt’s Credo with Kristjan Järvi and the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, and also playing duets with Dave Liebman. There are not many contemporary players with this kind of range.
Born into a musical family in Estonia in 1978, Randalu grew up in Germany. Both his parents are professional classical pianists, and all of his early music training was purely classical. Hearing Chick Corea’s Inside Out at the age of 13 changed some of his priorities: “It seemed to me so perfect that I thought at first that it must be all notated. And it had all this rhythmic energy, and sound-wise, harmonically and colour-wise was very interesting to me. At that point I had almost no historical jazz references at all - no early Miles, even, no Coltrane – I would learn about all of that later. But I felt motivated to create my own music with piano and synthesizer and sequencer and soon had my first band. By this point I had already been performing classical music for years and was playing at a serious level, but there was a gap between practicing my Liszt and Chopin and beginning to deal actively with jazz…” The gap was bridged in the following years by studies with a number of notable pianists, including John Taylor and Django Bates. A scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music allowed plenty of opportunities to hear New York’s improvisers at first hand, Ben Monder amongst them.
“Later it happened on a couple of occasions that our groups – Ben’s group and my group -- played one after the other at festivals in Germany and we talked several times about doing something together. But it didn’t happen until a festival organizer in Estonia proposed a duo concert….”
Markku Ounaskari and Kristjan Randalu first played opposite each other in a concert series organized by German radio station NDR. Ounaskari was then playing with the second edition of his Kuára group with Trygve Seim on saxes. When Seim formed his Helsinki Songs project a couple of years later, he invited both Ounaskari and Randalu to be part of it (an ECM album with Seim, Randalu, Ounaskari and Mats Eilertsen is in preparation).
Ounaskari has played with all the major Finnish jazz players and with many international jazz musicians including Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler, Tomasz Stanko and Marc Ducret. In addition to his Kuára recording with Samuli Mikkonen and Per Jørgensen, exploring Russian psalms and Finno-Ugrian folk songs in an improvisational context, Markku Ounaskari appears on several ECM recordings with folk singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland, including Starflowers, The Land That Is Not, The Half-Finished Heaven and The Magical Forest.
A musician in the New York City area for over 30 years, Ben Monder has performed with a wide variety of artists, including Jack McDuff, Marc Johnson, Lee Konitz, Billy Childs, Andrew Cyrille, George Garzone, Paul Motian, Maria Schneider, and Marshall Crenshaw. He also contributed guitar parts to the final David Bowie album, Blackstar. In addition to his own ECM album Amorphae, with Paul Motian, Andrew Cyrille and Pete Rende, Monder appears on Theo Bleckmann’s Elegy and Paul Motian’s Garden of Eden.
The Absence trio is touring in April and May. For details consult Kristjan’s web site www.randalu.com
Absence was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in July 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
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Elina Duni
Partir
Elina Duni: voice, piano, guitar, percussion
Release date: April 27, 2018
ECM 2587
B0028133-02
UPC: 6025 670 8641 3
After two highly ECM acclaimed albums - Matanë Malit and Dallëndyshe - with her quartet, Elina Duni issues her most intimate recording to date. On this entirely solo album, the Tirana-born vocalist accompanies herself on piano, guitar and frame drum, interpreting songs from very diverse sources - from folk songs and chansons to singer-songwriter ballads. Here we find traditional music from Albania, Kosovo, Armenia, Macedonia, Switzerland and Arab-Andalusia as well as Jacques Brel’s “Je ne sais pas”, Alain Oulman’s “Meu Amor”, Domenico Modugno’s “Amara Terra Mia”, Elina’s own “Let Us Dive In” and more. Twelve songs altogether, sung in nine languages: Albanian, German, French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Armenian, Yiddish and Arabic. Elina Duni’s uniquely-expressive voice and her pared-down arrangements locate a common thread of longing that runs through the material, as Partir brings together songs of love, loss and leaving, songs of the pain of separation and the courage to seek new beginnings.
Several factors converged to shape and influence the project. On a personal level, the break-up of a long-established relationship had left a cloud of uncertainty over the future of Duni’s quartet. “Would we continue, or wouldn’t we? We decided to take a longer pause. At the time it felt like the end of a big musical project, and I had to find another way to go on.”
One possibility was implied in contributions Duni had been making over the last decade to readings by her mother, the novelist, poet and essayist Bessa Myftiu. “We started doing this together in 2008. She would read from her books, and in between I would play songs, usually with guitar and percussion. And through this I gradually started to develop a solo repertoire”. When Duni began to play full solo concerts, she linked the songs with her own texts; these were written originally in French, and affected by the burgeoning refugee crisis which had made the singer reflect upon the meaning of exile in her own biography.
In performance, the songs have been presented “in the context of a ‘confession’, inspired by the texts of the songs and by stories I’d made up to emphasize that any of us can, through circumstances we can’t control, find ourselves in a situation where we’re torn away from places and people we care about. And this should, in my opinion, make us feel more solidarity with those who are forced to leave, more solidarity with each other generally. Putting that message across, the solo concerts started to feel like they were about more than just music.”
Elina Duni likens the experience of working on solo music, after many years of collaboration, to “withdrawing in a monastery. It’s a metaphysical experience, really, and you start to find out more about your inner resources.” Her almost minimalistic accompaniments on piano and guitar serve the essence of the songs, and her voice, an extremely flexible and subtle instrument, has never sounded better – as is immediately apparent from the beautiful album opener “Amara Terra Mia”. “Lamma Bada Yatathanna” - where the only accompaniment is the diffuse throb of the daf, the frame drum of the Middle East - is another very touching piece, giving full rein to the sinuousness of the Duni voice. The range of expression here is striking. Hear Elina singing “Je ne sais pas”, for instance, and you might well wish for a whole album of Brel interpretations from her. Each song seems to open up another avenue of possibility. In any case, radio programmers will have, with Partir, a broad palette to draw from.
How did she select the songs? “I wanted to move away a little from the Albanian-only focus of the last few records, because I’ve always also enjoyed communicating in many languages. The songs came from many places. Some I’ve known for years, some were from other projects - the Armenian song ‘Lusnak Gisher’ came via a theatre production I was involved with. The Arab song ‘Lamma Bada Yatathanna’ was one I knew and liked, and I wanted to sing it, not for political reasons, exactly, but to make a statement. The Yiddish song ‘Ofyn Weg’ was another one I knew and loved. And so on. And then the question was: how can I use the songs to tell a larger story? The idea to sing in nine languages was a decisive one - also, again, to stress the universality of the theme, about leaving, about facing the unknown, and the will to continue.”
Partir was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in July 2017, and produced by Manfred Eicher. The album is launched with an international solo tour. For more information visit www.elinaduni.com
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Awase
Nik Bärtsch: piano
Sha: bass clarinet, alto saxophone
Thomy Jordi: bass
Kaspar Rast: drums
Release date: May 4, 2018
ECM 2603
B0028299-02 (CD)
B0028300-01(Vinyl)
CD UPC: 6025 673 5867 1
2-LP 180g UPC: 6025 673 5869 5
Six years have passed since Live, the last release from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, the long gap bridged in 2015 with Continuum, an album from Mobile, Bärtsch’s all-acoustic project. “I wanted to give Ronin the peace and space it needed to develop,” says the Swiss composer-pianist. “Not to put it under pressure, and to take all the steps necessary before the next recording.”
Awase, recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in October 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher, updates us on the progress of one of the most original bands around, as well as the present-day status of ritual groove music, Bärtsch’s all-purpose term for his self-invented idiom equidistant from jazz and funk and contemporary composition. Almost by definition, rituals can’t be rushed, and Ronin has had some changes to absorb. With bassist Thomy Jordi replacing Björn Meyer in 2011, and percussionist Andi Pupato departing the following year, trimming the line-up from quintet to quartet, Ronin has gradually become a subtly different band. A leaner, more agile animal.
Bärtsch speaks of a new-found freedom and flexibility in the approach to the material, with “greater transparency, more interaction, more joy in every performance”. The freedom here extends to revisiting earlier Bärtsch modules alongside new compositions including, for the first time on a Ronin record, a piece by reedman Sha. “We’ve spent a long time working on the new repertoire, really checking out and fine tuning all the details.”
Awase, a term from Aikido, means “moving together” in the sense of matching energies, a fitting metaphor for the dynamic precision, tessellated grooves and balletic minimalism of Ronin today. In the old band, Bärtsch often chose to present Björn Meyer’s flamboyant 6-string bass as a lead instrument. Thomy Jordi’s 4-string bass guitar tends to be deployed within the fabric of the pieces, creatively fulfilling a more traditional bass function and locking in with Kaspar Rast’s powerful drums. With Bärtsch also scaling back his own solo playing, listeners are encouraged to hear the whole music and its layered, shifting approach to interaction in new ways.
The album opens with an abbreviated version of “Modul 60”, quite unlike the interpretation heard on the Mobile recording. “We’ve always taken the position that the compositions can be played by both groups – Mobile or Ronin – to bring out different aspects of the music. When we did ‘60’ with Mobile, I was hearing it in a very chamber music way and it radiated a sort of bittersweet atmosphere. With Ronin it has a sparseness, an emptiness and a roughness that I really like. In the studio Manfred and I had the idea that it would be nice to play it as a sort of ‘quote’, bringing the story forward from Continuum. So, this new version starts around the middle of the composition…”
“Modul 58” is built upon – in Ronin terms – “a simple pattern cycle, just 5 against 7, and the same motif even, but it created such an interesting form. We usually think that metre, rhythm and the start of a piece all begin on the ‘one’, but in a lot of the tribal music styles we admire there is often not such a clear downbeat. ‘58’ becomes a kind of metric mantra which keeps loading itself up until we get to the more open part. You can hear, almost ironically, the simplicity of the two rhythms but you cannot catch them at the same time. In its direction and its energy this piece still feels new to me, although there is something about it that seems archaic.”
The role of bass clarinettist and alto saxophonist Sha (born Stefan Haslebacher) has been steadily growing inside Ronin, and this is acknowledged by the inclusion of his composition “A”, which forms a contrasting transition on the album between “Modul 58” and “Modul 36”, while also being an effective piece in its own right. Nik Bärtsch: “When Ronin plays it as an organism it attains an enormous power and it shows, I think, that Sha is developing a personal and unique language as a composer.”
“Modul 36” is an old Ronin favorite which introduced the group to ECM listeners back in 2006: “Yes, it was a conscious decision to choose that piece to mark this quartet album also as a kind of new beginning, and to show how things have developed. In terms of structure and clear, fine detail, the compositional aspects – those things remain. But the group feeling is very different and the energy more voodoo-ish, perhaps. And I’m really enjoying playing as part of the band again on ‘36’, rather than soloing.”
Written “back in 2002 or 2003”, “Modul 34” receives its premiere recording here. “Sometimes pieces just have to wait until they are ready, or we are ready. Part of the challenge with ‘34’ was not to allow it to become too busy on the one hand, or too formal on the other.”
The members of Ronin meet every week, as they have done for many years now, to puzzle out the implications of Bärtsch’s pieces in workshops and performances at the Zürich club, Exil. The group is, says Nik, still coming to terms with the demanding final piece here, “Modul 59”. It is one which, he says, points the way to the future. “It begins from basic ideas, in this case to do with triplets, and builds until it becomes a sort of polyrhythmic, polyphonic carpet of sound. We’ve rehearsed and developed it extensively, and it still keeps surprising us.”
Par ailleurs le monsieur sera en ville le 4 mai
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- Inscription : 12 juin 2017, 13:42
Pour moi il ne l'est pas... Je veux dire pour mes achats personnels, ma vie personnelle d'auditeur,
Mais pour le jazz, pour les artistes, on dirait bien que oui. S'ils n'étaient pas là, il faudrait les inventer, Ou alors, il faut que le même travail ou des résultats équivalents soient accomplis par d'autres.
Pour moi ceux qui ont été essentiels c'est plus la radio. Donc oui les chaînes musicales de Radio-Canada et la CBC. Mais tout est relié.
Mais pour le jazz, pour les artistes, on dirait bien que oui. S'ils n'étaient pas là, il faudrait les inventer, Ou alors, il faut que le même travail ou des résultats équivalents soient accomplis par d'autres.
Pour moi ceux qui ont été essentiels c'est plus la radio. Donc oui les chaînes musicales de Radio-Canada et la CBC. Mais tout est relié.