viewtopic.php?f=19&t=82
Dans l'article suivant de Christophe Huss :
http://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique ... ge-ecorche
Pour ECM, sur iTunes : https://www.facebook.com/ecmrecords/pho ... =1&theater
-
Verbo
- 04036
- Inscription : 12 juin 2017, 13:42
Pour Schiff , en même temps, il parle du sujet suivant :
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=82
Dans l'article suivant de Christophe Huss :
http://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique ... ge-ecorche
Pour ECM, sur iTunes : https://www.facebook.com/ecmrecords/pho ... =1&theater
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=82
Dans l'article suivant de Christophe Huss :
http://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique ... ge-ecorche
Pour ECM, sur iTunes : https://www.facebook.com/ecmrecords/pho ... =1&theater
-
Verbo
- 04036
- Inscription : 12 juin 2017, 13:42
Ce lien semblait un peu bizarre pour iTunes il ne se connectait pas et cela date de 2014. Il faudrait aller voir sur iTunes et en Europe et au Canada.
En tapant sur ECM Records autant en France qu'au Canada je ne vois que deux pièces et pas enregistrées sur le label ECM c'est juste présent dans le sujet des morceaux.
Non mais il les a peut être mis en 2014 ou certains et si pas satisfait il les a retirés. Cela doit être cela.
Attendez je viens de voir Steve Reich mais je suis dans la magasin de France. Tiens Canada aussi...
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/steve ... 31465?l=fr
Mais cela peut être des exceptions.
En tapant sur ECM Records autant en France qu'au Canada je ne vois que deux pièces et pas enregistrées sur le label ECM c'est juste présent dans le sujet des morceaux.
Non mais il les a peut être mis en 2014 ou certains et si pas satisfait il les a retirés. Cela doit être cela.
Attendez je viens de voir Steve Reich mais je suis dans la magasin de France. Tiens Canada aussi...
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/steve ... 31465?l=fr
Dernière édition par Verbo le 29 août 2017, 20:10, édité 1 fois.
-
Verbo
- 04036
- Inscription : 12 juin 2017, 13:42
Cela aussi est là mais on peut pas faire notre recherche par Label ?
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/ecm-s ... 66313?l=fr
Pour le suivant , il donne une licence à Universal Music.
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/ecm-s ... 66313?l=fr
Pour le suivant , il donne une licence à Universal Music.
-
VanBasten
- 00752
- Inscription : 18 mai 2017, 22:59
By the way ECM offrira désormais son catalogue par voie de streaming
https://www.ecmrecords.com/public/docs/ ... eaming.pdf
https://www.ecmrecords.com/public/docs/ ... eaming.pdf
-
VanBasten
- 00752
- Inscription : 18 mai 2017, 22:59
Communiqués desnouveautés ECM de ce janvier
John Surman
Invisible Threads
John Surman: baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
Nelson Ayres: piano
Rob Waring: vibraphone, marimba
U.S. Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2588
B0027869-02
UPC: 6025 671 1317 1
The great British saxophonist and clarinettist John Surman introduces a fascinating new trio with Brazilian pianist Nelson Ayres and US vibraphonist Rob Waring, and a program of engaging compositions whose evocative themes invite subtle instrumental interaction. The story of the project really begins a decade ago, when Surman was playing with Jack DeJohnette’s Ripple Effect group. The rapport between Surman and singer Marlui Miranda in that ensemble led to an invitation to visit her Brazilian homeland, and to participate in a recording inspired by the songs of the Juruna people of the Amazon Basin. Out of this collaboration came the first meetings with pianist Nelson Ayres.
Ayres is highly regarded in Brazil as an arranger, composer and soloist, and he has worked with Airto Moreira, Milton Nascimento, Chico Buarque, César Camargo Mariano, Astrud Gilberto amongst many others, as well as visitors from Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter to Anat Cohen. Ayres led his own big band through the 1970s and into the 1980s, and in the early 1990s became conductor and artistic director of the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, bringing a Brazilian orchestral aesthetic to bear on contemporary music, often with jazz soloists. He is perhaps best known for his work with the group Pau Brasil.
The experience of playing together, both live and on Marlui Miranda’s album Fala de Bicho, Fala de Gente, left both Surman and Ayres with a wish to do more, and John began drafting material, initially for a duo album. “But almost as soon as I began writing I was hearing a third musical voice in my mind.” That third voice was to be Rob Waring, the New York born mallet percussionist who, like Surman himself, is now a resident of Norway.
Last heard on ECM with Mats Eilertsen on the album Rubicon, Rob Waring has been based in Oslo since 1981. His work spans a broad spectrum of musical approaches and styles. He studied classical percussion at the Juilliard School, and has played jazz improvised music in many forms. In 2002 he studied music in Bali, an experience which has been source of inspiration for his own music. Waring was a member of the experimental jazz band Søyr from 1986 to 2006 and has performed and recorded with David Friedman, Jon Eberson, Misha Alperin and many others, and composed commissioned works for soloists, chamber ensembles, jazz
groups and choirs, as well as electroacoustic music.
With his contributing musicians living 10,000 kilometres apart, Surman had little opportunity to road-test his new material: “Nelson and I managed to meet up in São Paulo for a couple of days to try out a few ideas and I later played through some of these ideas with Rob in Oslo. Eventually, a few days before the recording session, Nelson arrived in Oslo and we played together as a trio for the first time. Happily we all felt comfortable playing as a trio immediately - perhaps because we share a wide range of musical interests. Although we all have a background in jazz improvisation, Nelson brings with him a wealth of experience performing Brazilian instrumental music, whilst Rob's work as a classical percussionist and his interest in a broad scope of contemporary music adds yet another colour."
Almost all the pieces were created for this album, although “Stoke Damerel”, named for the Plymouth parish where Surman once lived, was in the concert repertoire of John’s duo with organist Howard Moody (the duo can be heard on the album Rain On The Window.) Two pieces emerged in the course of the session: “After we’d finished playing the tune called ‘Byndweed’, there was a feeling that there was something more to be explored in its harmonic content. We were looking at that, and Manfred suggested we make some sort of chorale out its harmonies. So the piece which is called ‘At First Sight’ grew out of that idea, and so did ‘Another Reflection’…”
***
Already by the mid-1960s John Surman (born in Devon in 1944) was one of the most widely celebrated of European jazz musicians. His agile baritone playing with the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, John McLaughlin, and Chris McGregor stunned musicians, critics and listeners alike, and he swept the jazz polls, touring Japan with a Down Beat poll-winners group in 1970. With his own groups he continued to make waves – particularly with The Trio, with Barre Phillips and Stu Martin, a band that set new standards for intense small group interaction. It was with these musicians that Surman would make his debut ECM appearance, on Phillips’s innovative Mountainscapes in 1976.This was soon followed by the Surman solo album Upon Reflectionand thereafter by a sequence of remarkable recordings in many instrumental configurations and formats. These have included duos with Jack DeJohnette, the Brass Project co-led with John Warren, a Nordic Quartet with Karin Krog and Terje Rypdal, collaborations with Paul Bley, large scale works such as Proverbs and Songs (with the Salisbury Festival Chorus) and Free and Equal (with London Brass), and music with the Trans4mation String Quartet and Chris Laurence (Coruscating and The Spaces In Between).
John Surman has won numerous awards for his work, including most recently the Ivor Novello Jazz Award 2017, in recognition of his outstanding jazz compositions.
***
Invisible Threads was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in July 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher. Plans for a 2018 European tour by John Surman, Nelson Ayres and Rob Waring are currently being finalised.
ECM
Kit Downes
Obsidian
Kit Downes: church organ
with Tom Challenger: tenor saxophone
Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2559
B0027871-02
UPC: 6025 578 2651 7
Obsidian is the first ECM solo album from Kit Downes. Previously heard as pianist on the debut recording of Thomas Strønen’s group Time Is A Blind Guide in 2015, Downes (born 1986 in Norwich, UK) is widely-regarded as one of the outstanding British jazz players of his generation, through his work with his trio and with groups such as Troyka, the Golden Age of Steam and Enemy, as well as long running collaborations with Stan Sulzmann and Clark Tracey. The present recording, however, has little overt connection to “jazz” – although it could only have been made by an improviser of subtle sensibilities, and wide-ranging musical knowledge. It features Downes on church organ, exploring the idiosyncrasies of three different instruments.
First, we hear the grand three-manual organ of London’s Union Chapel, built by Henry Willis in 1877, the size and the scale of the instrument immediately apparent on opening track “Kings”. Later, the scene shifts to the Suffolk countryside with a two-manual organ at the ancient church of St John’s in Snape, and finally a single manual instrument with no pedalboard, basically a converted harmonium, at St Edmund’s Church in Bromeswell. Small or large, the instruments have their distinct characteristics, imaginatively emphasized in the music Downes has created for each of them, “giving a push and pull to the recording, in terms of dynamic and size.”
Some of Downes’s earliest musical experiences were with the pipe organ and in recent years he has been revisiting it, encouraged by saxophonist Tom Challenger who appears as guest on one track here (“Modern Gods”). Downes’s and Challenger’s earlier improvisational project Vyamanikal found them making an exploratory journey around England’s churches, which helped establish a familiarity with some of the instruments heard here.
“I started writing with the idea of getting these organs from different parts of the UK speaking to each other. All built at different times, with different stops and different sounds. It feels like time-travelling, somehow trying to find a common thread.”
With the exception of the well-travelled traditional tune “Black Is The Colour” (of Scottish origin, it found a new home in the Appalachians, and in the early 1960s was famously adapted by Berio for his Folk Songs collection), and the final track “The Gift” – based on a composition by Kit’s father – all music here is by Downes. It has been created in diverse ways. Some pieces, including “Seeing Things”, are purely improvised. “Rings of Saturn” is a composite of several improvisations recorded at the Snape church. For other pieces improvisation suggested a direction to be followed further. “I would jot down elements that I found particularly interesting, then start to fill in the cracks between the abstract ideas to make fuller pieces.”
Obsidian is also a reflection upon other traditions of improvising associated with the organ, and Kit speaks with admiration of Messiaen’s work in this context. “The organ is the ultimate orchestrator. What really appeals to me about Messiaen’s improvisations is how he blends the sounds of the instrument to give real form and colour to the performance. You can be both an improviser and an orchestrator in the moment.”
Obsidian was recorded in November 2016. A year later, Downes toured with some of its repertoire, performing the music in contexts ranging from the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to Jazzfest Berlin, and netting many positive reviews:
"Of all the concerts I have heard in this space, Downes’s command of the intricacies and expressive potential of that grand and ancient instrument, the pipe organ, were the most impressive", wrote Josef Woodward in Downbeat, reviewing Kit’s concert at the Keiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin.
“Some of the greatest moments” of the Huddersfield Festival “were the gentlest,” wrote Guy Dammann in The Spectator, citing the “luminous glow” of Downes’s rendition of “Black Is The Colour”.
Kit Downes is currently preparing a new round of solo concerts, and also developing new trio music for church organ, saxophone and guitar.
ECM
Thomas Strønen
Time Is A Blind Guide
Lucus
Ayumi Tanaka: piano
Håkon Aase: violin
Lucy Railton: violoncello
Ole Morten Vågan: double bass
Thomas Strønen: drums, percussion
Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2576
B0027870-02
UPC: 6025 577 9058 0
Lucus, the second recording from Norwegian drummer/composer Thomas Strønen’s Time Is A Blind Guide, marks a bold step forward from the critically acclaimed debut (described by John Kelman on AllAboutJazz as “a stunning record that stands out as one of Strønen’s most expansive, cinematic and flat-out lyrical albums”). With the group currently trimmed to quintet size, and a new pianist in Wakayama-born Ayumi Tanaka, there is a heightened emphasis on improvisation.
“We’ve played much more,” says Strønen, “and built up a trust in the ensemble. All the players have more confidence in the shared expression of the group and, in a positive sense, less dependency on the compositions, which are offered, really, as guidelines. To me it’s important that the players should feel connected to the music and play what’s right for them. When I wrote the music for the first album the sound of the group existed only in my imagination at that point, and there were a lot more notes on paper. But with the repertoire of Lucus, things are opened up. And there is more than one way to interpret these pieces: in concert, something played as a ballad one night might be a piece that simply explodes on the next night.”
The music Strønen has written for the ensemble is more space-conscious than last time around, letting in more light, in line with the connotations of the album title, “Lucus” signifying a sacred grove, or a clearing in the forest. The radiant strings seem particularly to bring out this idea. (As it happens, the music was composed in view of the forest, too – Thomas lives out in the Norwegian woodlands).
Strønen first heard Ayumi Tanaka a few years ago while teaching at Oslo’s Royal Academy, where he also organised a concert series. “I liked to set challenges for the students and I asked Ayumi to give a solo concert, something she’d never done before. Her performance was just amazing, and I thought immediately that I have to play with her in some setting.” Tanaka substituted for Kit Downes at a few concerts with the first edition of Time Is a Blind Guide. “When she arrived for the first rehearsal she already knew all the material, having learned a dozen complex pieces with tricky time changes and so on by ear, and didn’t need any scores at all.” She was clearly a logical choice to take over the piano chair in the ensemble. Strønen: “I feel a connection between European contemporary music and jazz and Japanese music in the way that she manoeuvres inside the group sound… She can be very abstract in her playing, with a sparse quality I like a lot, and then the next moment full of temperament.” One can perhaps also sense a connection to early Paul Bley in some of Ayumi’s phrases, paraphrases and ellipses. And a further connection to the dawn of new jazz might also be felt in Ole Morten Vågan’s Haden-like bass intro to the piece called “Tension”.
But Time Is A Blind Guided is a flexible, mutating ensemble and the quintet effectively contains both a string trio and a piano trio. With Lucus a further dynamic adjustment has taken place, in which cellist Lucy Railton, bassist Ole Morten Vågan and the drummer-leader have drawn closer in the engine room of the ensemble while Tanaka and violinist Håkon Aase, says Strønen, “are fulfilling more of a soloist’s function, on top of what we are doing – at least some of the time.”
As on the group’s debut album there are excellent contributions from the string players. The group name Time Is A Blind Guide is taken from Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces, a connection Strønen underlines with the track of the same title here. The strings here seem to reference both folk music and baroque playing before the piano enters to gently lead the music elsewhere. Manfred Eicher’s production brings out all the fine detail in the grain of the collective sound and the halo of its overtones, captured in the famously-responsive acoustic of Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo in March 2017.
Ole Morten Vågan and Håkon Aase have appeared on other ECM recordings recently. Bassist Vågan has been a member of Maciej Obara’s quartet for five years and can be heard on the Polish saxophonist’s ECM debut Unloved. Violinist Håkon Aase plays regularly with trumpeter Mathias Eick’s touring band and is featured on Eick’s new album Ravensburg (release date: March 2018).
Thomas Strønen has been an ECM recording artist since 2005 when the label released his album Parish, with Bobo Stenson, Fredrik Ljungkvist and Mats Eilertsen. It was followed by recordings with Food, Strønen’s duo-plus-guests project with Iain Ballamy. Food’s discs include Quiet Inlet, Mercurial Balm and This Is Not A Miracle.
ECM
Bobo Stenson Trio
Contra la indecisión
Bobo Stenson: piano
Anders Jormin: double bass
Jon Fält: drums
Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2582
B0027868-02
UPC: 6025 578 6976 7
“A strong case can be made that Bobo Stenson is the greatest living jazz pianist born outside the United States. He is a poet of the first order. Stenson’s spontaneous melodic and harmonic discoveries, his trajectories and distant departures, arrive at a breakthrough to lyricism that, once found, sounds like it has always been there.”
– Thomas Conrad, Jazz Times
Bobo Stenson’s trio takes a stand against indecision on this decisively beautiful new album. Characteristic elements including Stenson’s lyrical touch, Jormin’s folk-flavored arco bass and Jon Fält’s flickering, textural drumming are all well-displayed on Contra la indecisión, the trio’s first new recording in six years. As ever, the group draws upon a wide range of source materials. A yearning title song by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, Bartók’s adaptation of a Slovak folk song, a piece from Mompou’s Cançons I Danses collection, and Erik Satie’s Elégie all fit into the program, alongside original compositions and group improvising. So strong is the group’s character and the musical identity of each of its members that the assimilation of this material always seems organic and logical. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “In Stenson’s records you don’t hear strategies or contentions, but a natural working flow.”
With Stenson, the respectful transformation of the source material is the essential thing. Unlike colleague Anders Jormin, who has five new pieces here, he’s not an especially prolific composer – although his rare tunes, like “Alice” here are worth waiting for – but he brings his own sensibilities to everything played. “We pick things from different areas,” Stenson once explained to All About Jazz. “It doesn’t matter so much where it comes from. For us, it’s more about what we do with it. You try to be true to the original, and you try to take it a little further.”
Pieces this time around have come from various contexts. “The Bartók piece was one we’d played together with a choir a few years ago,” says Bobo. “The Satie I’ve known for a long time and always liked. Anders brought in the Rodríguez tune. His pieces seem to work well for us. [The Stenson Trio’s 2007 recording Cantando also opened with a Rodríguez composition] ‘Cancion contra la indecisíon’ is an older Rodríguez song, from the ’70s. And then the Mompou: I’d played some Mompou together with [English saxophonist] Martin Speake a few years ago, also music from the Cançons I Danses, but not this particular piece. When we play the Mompou tune with the trio in concert we often use it as an intro to ‘Don’s Kora Song’ [a Don Cherry composition heard on Cantando]. And then Anders, of course, is always writing and writing music. He brings his tunes to us and we see which ones will work for the trio. What else? The ‘Kalimba Impressions’ is an improvised piece. Jon Fält had two kalimbas with him of different sizes, keys, tonalities. We set up a sort of melody and based the piece around that…”
Bobo Stenson and Anders Jormin have been musical partners for more than thirty years now. Early shared projects included work in the co-operative band Rena Rama with saxophonist Lenart Åberg; Stenson also played on Jormin’s 1984 album Nordic Light. Anders subsequently joined Bobo Stenson’s trio, working with its succession of drummers – first Rune Carlsson, then Jon Christensen (see the ECM albums Reflections, War Orphans and Serenity), and Paul Motian (Goodbye).
In 2007 the drum chair was taken by a player then little known outside the Swedish free scene, Jon Fält. “We’d been playing with Paul Motian, but Paul had decided he wasn’t going to leave New York anymore, which was difficult for a working band. And Jon Fält I’d known since he was a teenager … I saw him again at the Fasching Club in Stockholm where they had some special event, some celebration. I was supposed to play in duo with the bassist Christian Spering, but I asked Jon to join us for a few pieces. It was such fun that I called Anders afterwards and said ‘I think we have the new drummer for the trio.’” A decade and three albums later, it’s difficult to imagine another player fitting this group so well. Fält’s playful, lightning-quick responses, challenging and detailing the musical action, are fully integrated into the trio’s musical concept and character.
Like Cantando and Indicum, Contra la indecisíon was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI studio, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
John Surman
Invisible Threads
John Surman: baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
Nelson Ayres: piano
Rob Waring: vibraphone, marimba
U.S. Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2588
B0027869-02
UPC: 6025 671 1317 1
The great British saxophonist and clarinettist John Surman introduces a fascinating new trio with Brazilian pianist Nelson Ayres and US vibraphonist Rob Waring, and a program of engaging compositions whose evocative themes invite subtle instrumental interaction. The story of the project really begins a decade ago, when Surman was playing with Jack DeJohnette’s Ripple Effect group. The rapport between Surman and singer Marlui Miranda in that ensemble led to an invitation to visit her Brazilian homeland, and to participate in a recording inspired by the songs of the Juruna people of the Amazon Basin. Out of this collaboration came the first meetings with pianist Nelson Ayres.
Ayres is highly regarded in Brazil as an arranger, composer and soloist, and he has worked with Airto Moreira, Milton Nascimento, Chico Buarque, César Camargo Mariano, Astrud Gilberto amongst many others, as well as visitors from Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter to Anat Cohen. Ayres led his own big band through the 1970s and into the 1980s, and in the early 1990s became conductor and artistic director of the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, bringing a Brazilian orchestral aesthetic to bear on contemporary music, often with jazz soloists. He is perhaps best known for his work with the group Pau Brasil.
The experience of playing together, both live and on Marlui Miranda’s album Fala de Bicho, Fala de Gente, left both Surman and Ayres with a wish to do more, and John began drafting material, initially for a duo album. “But almost as soon as I began writing I was hearing a third musical voice in my mind.” That third voice was to be Rob Waring, the New York born mallet percussionist who, like Surman himself, is now a resident of Norway.
Last heard on ECM with Mats Eilertsen on the album Rubicon, Rob Waring has been based in Oslo since 1981. His work spans a broad spectrum of musical approaches and styles. He studied classical percussion at the Juilliard School, and has played jazz improvised music in many forms. In 2002 he studied music in Bali, an experience which has been source of inspiration for his own music. Waring was a member of the experimental jazz band Søyr from 1986 to 2006 and has performed and recorded with David Friedman, Jon Eberson, Misha Alperin and many others, and composed commissioned works for soloists, chamber ensembles, jazz
groups and choirs, as well as electroacoustic music.
With his contributing musicians living 10,000 kilometres apart, Surman had little opportunity to road-test his new material: “Nelson and I managed to meet up in São Paulo for a couple of days to try out a few ideas and I later played through some of these ideas with Rob in Oslo. Eventually, a few days before the recording session, Nelson arrived in Oslo and we played together as a trio for the first time. Happily we all felt comfortable playing as a trio immediately - perhaps because we share a wide range of musical interests. Although we all have a background in jazz improvisation, Nelson brings with him a wealth of experience performing Brazilian instrumental music, whilst Rob's work as a classical percussionist and his interest in a broad scope of contemporary music adds yet another colour."
Almost all the pieces were created for this album, although “Stoke Damerel”, named for the Plymouth parish where Surman once lived, was in the concert repertoire of John’s duo with organist Howard Moody (the duo can be heard on the album Rain On The Window.) Two pieces emerged in the course of the session: “After we’d finished playing the tune called ‘Byndweed’, there was a feeling that there was something more to be explored in its harmonic content. We were looking at that, and Manfred suggested we make some sort of chorale out its harmonies. So the piece which is called ‘At First Sight’ grew out of that idea, and so did ‘Another Reflection’…”
***
Already by the mid-1960s John Surman (born in Devon in 1944) was one of the most widely celebrated of European jazz musicians. His agile baritone playing with the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, John McLaughlin, and Chris McGregor stunned musicians, critics and listeners alike, and he swept the jazz polls, touring Japan with a Down Beat poll-winners group in 1970. With his own groups he continued to make waves – particularly with The Trio, with Barre Phillips and Stu Martin, a band that set new standards for intense small group interaction. It was with these musicians that Surman would make his debut ECM appearance, on Phillips’s innovative Mountainscapes in 1976.This was soon followed by the Surman solo album Upon Reflectionand thereafter by a sequence of remarkable recordings in many instrumental configurations and formats. These have included duos with Jack DeJohnette, the Brass Project co-led with John Warren, a Nordic Quartet with Karin Krog and Terje Rypdal, collaborations with Paul Bley, large scale works such as Proverbs and Songs (with the Salisbury Festival Chorus) and Free and Equal (with London Brass), and music with the Trans4mation String Quartet and Chris Laurence (Coruscating and The Spaces In Between).
John Surman has won numerous awards for his work, including most recently the Ivor Novello Jazz Award 2017, in recognition of his outstanding jazz compositions.
***
Invisible Threads was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in July 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher. Plans for a 2018 European tour by John Surman, Nelson Ayres and Rob Waring are currently being finalised.
ECM
Kit Downes
Obsidian
Kit Downes: church organ
with Tom Challenger: tenor saxophone
Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2559
B0027871-02
UPC: 6025 578 2651 7
Obsidian is the first ECM solo album from Kit Downes. Previously heard as pianist on the debut recording of Thomas Strønen’s group Time Is A Blind Guide in 2015, Downes (born 1986 in Norwich, UK) is widely-regarded as one of the outstanding British jazz players of his generation, through his work with his trio and with groups such as Troyka, the Golden Age of Steam and Enemy, as well as long running collaborations with Stan Sulzmann and Clark Tracey. The present recording, however, has little overt connection to “jazz” – although it could only have been made by an improviser of subtle sensibilities, and wide-ranging musical knowledge. It features Downes on church organ, exploring the idiosyncrasies of three different instruments.
First, we hear the grand three-manual organ of London’s Union Chapel, built by Henry Willis in 1877, the size and the scale of the instrument immediately apparent on opening track “Kings”. Later, the scene shifts to the Suffolk countryside with a two-manual organ at the ancient church of St John’s in Snape, and finally a single manual instrument with no pedalboard, basically a converted harmonium, at St Edmund’s Church in Bromeswell. Small or large, the instruments have their distinct characteristics, imaginatively emphasized in the music Downes has created for each of them, “giving a push and pull to the recording, in terms of dynamic and size.”
Some of Downes’s earliest musical experiences were with the pipe organ and in recent years he has been revisiting it, encouraged by saxophonist Tom Challenger who appears as guest on one track here (“Modern Gods”). Downes’s and Challenger’s earlier improvisational project Vyamanikal found them making an exploratory journey around England’s churches, which helped establish a familiarity with some of the instruments heard here.
“I started writing with the idea of getting these organs from different parts of the UK speaking to each other. All built at different times, with different stops and different sounds. It feels like time-travelling, somehow trying to find a common thread.”
With the exception of the well-travelled traditional tune “Black Is The Colour” (of Scottish origin, it found a new home in the Appalachians, and in the early 1960s was famously adapted by Berio for his Folk Songs collection), and the final track “The Gift” – based on a composition by Kit’s father – all music here is by Downes. It has been created in diverse ways. Some pieces, including “Seeing Things”, are purely improvised. “Rings of Saturn” is a composite of several improvisations recorded at the Snape church. For other pieces improvisation suggested a direction to be followed further. “I would jot down elements that I found particularly interesting, then start to fill in the cracks between the abstract ideas to make fuller pieces.”
Obsidian is also a reflection upon other traditions of improvising associated with the organ, and Kit speaks with admiration of Messiaen’s work in this context. “The organ is the ultimate orchestrator. What really appeals to me about Messiaen’s improvisations is how he blends the sounds of the instrument to give real form and colour to the performance. You can be both an improviser and an orchestrator in the moment.”
Obsidian was recorded in November 2016. A year later, Downes toured with some of its repertoire, performing the music in contexts ranging from the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to Jazzfest Berlin, and netting many positive reviews:
"Of all the concerts I have heard in this space, Downes’s command of the intricacies and expressive potential of that grand and ancient instrument, the pipe organ, were the most impressive", wrote Josef Woodward in Downbeat, reviewing Kit’s concert at the Keiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin.
“Some of the greatest moments” of the Huddersfield Festival “were the gentlest,” wrote Guy Dammann in The Spectator, citing the “luminous glow” of Downes’s rendition of “Black Is The Colour”.
Kit Downes is currently preparing a new round of solo concerts, and also developing new trio music for church organ, saxophone and guitar.
ECM
Thomas Strønen
Time Is A Blind Guide
Lucus
Ayumi Tanaka: piano
Håkon Aase: violin
Lucy Railton: violoncello
Ole Morten Vågan: double bass
Thomas Strønen: drums, percussion
Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2576
B0027870-02
UPC: 6025 577 9058 0
Lucus, the second recording from Norwegian drummer/composer Thomas Strønen’s Time Is A Blind Guide, marks a bold step forward from the critically acclaimed debut (described by John Kelman on AllAboutJazz as “a stunning record that stands out as one of Strønen’s most expansive, cinematic and flat-out lyrical albums”). With the group currently trimmed to quintet size, and a new pianist in Wakayama-born Ayumi Tanaka, there is a heightened emphasis on improvisation.
“We’ve played much more,” says Strønen, “and built up a trust in the ensemble. All the players have more confidence in the shared expression of the group and, in a positive sense, less dependency on the compositions, which are offered, really, as guidelines. To me it’s important that the players should feel connected to the music and play what’s right for them. When I wrote the music for the first album the sound of the group existed only in my imagination at that point, and there were a lot more notes on paper. But with the repertoire of Lucus, things are opened up. And there is more than one way to interpret these pieces: in concert, something played as a ballad one night might be a piece that simply explodes on the next night.”
The music Strønen has written for the ensemble is more space-conscious than last time around, letting in more light, in line with the connotations of the album title, “Lucus” signifying a sacred grove, or a clearing in the forest. The radiant strings seem particularly to bring out this idea. (As it happens, the music was composed in view of the forest, too – Thomas lives out in the Norwegian woodlands).
Strønen first heard Ayumi Tanaka a few years ago while teaching at Oslo’s Royal Academy, where he also organised a concert series. “I liked to set challenges for the students and I asked Ayumi to give a solo concert, something she’d never done before. Her performance was just amazing, and I thought immediately that I have to play with her in some setting.” Tanaka substituted for Kit Downes at a few concerts with the first edition of Time Is a Blind Guide. “When she arrived for the first rehearsal she already knew all the material, having learned a dozen complex pieces with tricky time changes and so on by ear, and didn’t need any scores at all.” She was clearly a logical choice to take over the piano chair in the ensemble. Strønen: “I feel a connection between European contemporary music and jazz and Japanese music in the way that she manoeuvres inside the group sound… She can be very abstract in her playing, with a sparse quality I like a lot, and then the next moment full of temperament.” One can perhaps also sense a connection to early Paul Bley in some of Ayumi’s phrases, paraphrases and ellipses. And a further connection to the dawn of new jazz might also be felt in Ole Morten Vågan’s Haden-like bass intro to the piece called “Tension”.
But Time Is A Blind Guided is a flexible, mutating ensemble and the quintet effectively contains both a string trio and a piano trio. With Lucus a further dynamic adjustment has taken place, in which cellist Lucy Railton, bassist Ole Morten Vågan and the drummer-leader have drawn closer in the engine room of the ensemble while Tanaka and violinist Håkon Aase, says Strønen, “are fulfilling more of a soloist’s function, on top of what we are doing – at least some of the time.”
As on the group’s debut album there are excellent contributions from the string players. The group name Time Is A Blind Guide is taken from Anne Michael’s novel Fugitive Pieces, a connection Strønen underlines with the track of the same title here. The strings here seem to reference both folk music and baroque playing before the piano enters to gently lead the music elsewhere. Manfred Eicher’s production brings out all the fine detail in the grain of the collective sound and the halo of its overtones, captured in the famously-responsive acoustic of Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo in March 2017.
Ole Morten Vågan and Håkon Aase have appeared on other ECM recordings recently. Bassist Vågan has been a member of Maciej Obara’s quartet for five years and can be heard on the Polish saxophonist’s ECM debut Unloved. Violinist Håkon Aase plays regularly with trumpeter Mathias Eick’s touring band and is featured on Eick’s new album Ravensburg (release date: March 2018).
Thomas Strønen has been an ECM recording artist since 2005 when the label released his album Parish, with Bobo Stenson, Fredrik Ljungkvist and Mats Eilertsen. It was followed by recordings with Food, Strønen’s duo-plus-guests project with Iain Ballamy. Food’s discs include Quiet Inlet, Mercurial Balm and This Is Not A Miracle.
ECM
Bobo Stenson Trio
Contra la indecisión
Bobo Stenson: piano
Anders Jormin: double bass
Jon Fält: drums
Release date: January 19, 2018
ECM 2582
B0027868-02
UPC: 6025 578 6976 7
“A strong case can be made that Bobo Stenson is the greatest living jazz pianist born outside the United States. He is a poet of the first order. Stenson’s spontaneous melodic and harmonic discoveries, his trajectories and distant departures, arrive at a breakthrough to lyricism that, once found, sounds like it has always been there.”
– Thomas Conrad, Jazz Times
Bobo Stenson’s trio takes a stand against indecision on this decisively beautiful new album. Characteristic elements including Stenson’s lyrical touch, Jormin’s folk-flavored arco bass and Jon Fält’s flickering, textural drumming are all well-displayed on Contra la indecisión, the trio’s first new recording in six years. As ever, the group draws upon a wide range of source materials. A yearning title song by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, Bartók’s adaptation of a Slovak folk song, a piece from Mompou’s Cançons I Danses collection, and Erik Satie’s Elégie all fit into the program, alongside original compositions and group improvising. So strong is the group’s character and the musical identity of each of its members that the assimilation of this material always seems organic and logical. As Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times, “In Stenson’s records you don’t hear strategies or contentions, but a natural working flow.”
With Stenson, the respectful transformation of the source material is the essential thing. Unlike colleague Anders Jormin, who has five new pieces here, he’s not an especially prolific composer – although his rare tunes, like “Alice” here are worth waiting for – but he brings his own sensibilities to everything played. “We pick things from different areas,” Stenson once explained to All About Jazz. “It doesn’t matter so much where it comes from. For us, it’s more about what we do with it. You try to be true to the original, and you try to take it a little further.”
Pieces this time around have come from various contexts. “The Bartók piece was one we’d played together with a choir a few years ago,” says Bobo. “The Satie I’ve known for a long time and always liked. Anders brought in the Rodríguez tune. His pieces seem to work well for us. [The Stenson Trio’s 2007 recording Cantando also opened with a Rodríguez composition] ‘Cancion contra la indecisíon’ is an older Rodríguez song, from the ’70s. And then the Mompou: I’d played some Mompou together with [English saxophonist] Martin Speake a few years ago, also music from the Cançons I Danses, but not this particular piece. When we play the Mompou tune with the trio in concert we often use it as an intro to ‘Don’s Kora Song’ [a Don Cherry composition heard on Cantando]. And then Anders, of course, is always writing and writing music. He brings his tunes to us and we see which ones will work for the trio. What else? The ‘Kalimba Impressions’ is an improvised piece. Jon Fält had two kalimbas with him of different sizes, keys, tonalities. We set up a sort of melody and based the piece around that…”
Bobo Stenson and Anders Jormin have been musical partners for more than thirty years now. Early shared projects included work in the co-operative band Rena Rama with saxophonist Lenart Åberg; Stenson also played on Jormin’s 1984 album Nordic Light. Anders subsequently joined Bobo Stenson’s trio, working with its succession of drummers – first Rune Carlsson, then Jon Christensen (see the ECM albums Reflections, War Orphans and Serenity), and Paul Motian (Goodbye).
In 2007 the drum chair was taken by a player then little known outside the Swedish free scene, Jon Fält. “We’d been playing with Paul Motian, but Paul had decided he wasn’t going to leave New York anymore, which was difficult for a working band. And Jon Fält I’d known since he was a teenager … I saw him again at the Fasching Club in Stockholm where they had some special event, some celebration. I was supposed to play in duo with the bassist Christian Spering, but I asked Jon to join us for a few pieces. It was such fun that I called Anders afterwards and said ‘I think we have the new drummer for the trio.’” A decade and three albums later, it’s difficult to imagine another player fitting this group so well. Fält’s playful, lightning-quick responses, challenging and detailing the musical action, are fully integrated into the trio’s musical concept and character.
Like Cantando and Indicum, Contra la indecisíon was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI studio, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
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Matériel de presse de la prochaine cuvée .
ECM
Andy Sheppard Quartet
Romaria
Andy Sheppard: tenor and soprano saxophones
Eivind Aarset: guitar
Michel Benita: double bass
Sebastian Rochford: drums
Release: February 16, 2017
ECM 2577
B0027932-02
UPC CD: 6025 578 6980 4
UPC LP 180g: 6025 673 0185 1
Romaria is the latest chapter in a musical story that began with saxophonist Andy Sheppard’s free-flowing Trio Libero recording with bassist Michel Benita and drummer Sebastian Rochford back in 2011. The creative understanding between the three highly-individual protagonists was unmissable. For the subsequent album Surrounded by Sea, recorded in 2014, Eivind Aarset was added on guitar and electronics, bringing the group to quartet size and broadening its work method. As Sheppard explained to UK website Jazz Views, “I wanted to take what I was doing with Trio Libero and add the harmonies that I can hear in my head when playing with just bass and drums. Eivind is an amazing ‘orchestral’ voice with exquisite taste – the perfect choice for this role.” In an interview with Jazzwise magazine, Sheppard went further: “The sound-world that I have with this quartet is my dream band.” US magazine Jazz Times called the quartet’s music “impressionistic yet suffused with piercing emotional clarity,” a description also applicable for Romaria.
In this new program of compositions by Andy Sheppard (plus the title track by Brazilian singer-songwriter Renato Teixeira) the drones and washes of Eivind Aarset’s guitar and electronics once again help to establish a climate in which improvisation can take place. There’s a highly atmospheric, ambient drift to the music which Sheppard clearly finds liberating, as do Michel Benita and Seb Rochford, free to move in and out of conventional rhythm section roles and to make impassioned statements of their own. And there is also drive: rubato and propulsive elements can co-exist and overlap in Sheppard’s musical universe, see for instance “Thirteen,” “They Came From The North” and “All Becomes Again”, all distinguished by dynamic interaction.
“I wanted to continue the atmosphere of Surrounded by Sea,” says Andy Sheppard, “and write music which would bring out the wonderful musicality of Eivind, Seb and Michel and also make the core a little more robust, with more of an emphasis on groove and energy than the last album.”
The opening and closing tracks were originally two versions of a slowly-unfolding ballad entitled “Forever and a Day”, both featuring gentle saxophone by the leader and melodic bass from Michel Benita against minimalistic drums and Aarset’s halo of sounds: “Manfred’s inspired idea of using both takes to open and close the session made me retitle the music accordingly.”
“With Every Flower That Falls” belongs to a suite of music that Sheppard was commissioned to write as a “live score” to accompany a screening of Fritz Lang’s prophetic science-fiction classicMetropolis at the Bristol International Jazz Festival (where it was performed with a ten piece ensemble with Sheppard, Aarset and Michele Rabbia among the soloists).
Title track “Romaria” was recommended to Andy Sheppard by his wife Sara: “She suggested I explore it, and played me the wonderful version by Ellis Regina, which of course I fell in love with immediately. For me, it also ties in with our recent relocation to Portugal, land of sunshine and saudades, two things that I hope the listener will find on this recording…”
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Andy Sheppard’s first leader date for ECM was the 2008 recording Movements In Colour(where Eivind Aarset was one of the featured guitarists). In addition to the aforementioned Trio Libero album Sheppard can also be heard with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow on Trios(recorded 2012) and Andando el Tiempo (2015) and on ten of Carla Bley’s albums on the ECM distributed WATT label, beginning with Fleur Carnivore in 1988. Sheppard has written music for ensembles of every size including his Saxophone Massive project with up to 200 players, and been featured as soloist with great jazz composers and arrangers including George Russell and Gil Evans.
Andy Sheppard and Michel Benita have been crossing paths since the 1980s. In 2008 Sheppard, Benita and Sebastian Rochford came together in a project at the Coutances Jazz Festival in northern France. It was here that Sheppard first glimpsed the potential of this particular musical combination.
Seb Rochford, whose interest in jazz was first sparked by witnessing an Andy Sheppard concert in Aberdeen, has meanwhile made his own distinctive contributions to the genre with his bands including Polar Bear. Rochford’s resumé has embraced work with everyone from Brian Eno to Herbie Hancock, from Patti Smith to Matana Roberts.
Each quartet member is also a bandleader in his own right, and Michel Benita, French bassist born in Algiers, recorded the album River Silver with his Ethics band (featuring Eivind Aarset, Matthieu Michel, and koto player Mieko Miyazaki) for ECM in 2015. Benita has played with numerous jazz musicians including Dewey Redman, Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler, Joe Lovano, Steve Kuhn, Michel Portal and many more.
Eivind Aarset’s ECM album Dream Logic was released in 2012. It was followed by Atmosphèreswith an improvising quartet with Tigran Hamasyan, Arve Henriksen and Jan Bang. Other ECM appearances include Nils Petter Molvӕr’s influential Khmer and Solid Ether, Small Labyrinthswith Marilyn Mazur’s Future Song, Arild Andersen’s Electra, John Hassell’s Last Night The Moon Came…, Ketil Bjørnstad’s La Notte, and Food’s Mercurial Balm.
Romaria was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo in April 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
ECM
Shinya Fukumori Trio
For 2 Akis
Matthieu Bordenave: tenor saxophone
Walter Lang: piano
Shinya Fukumori: drums
Release date: February 16, 2018
ECM 2574
B0027936-02
UPC: 6025 578 8817 1
For 2 Akis is the ECM debut for a Japanese-French-German trio with a lyrical sound of its own. Drummer-leader Shinya Fukumori, also the principal composer for the band, is an imaginative melodist at several levels, and the attention to timbre and detail and space which distinguishes his drumming is also reflected in the color-fields of his free-floating ballads, and his adaptations and arrangements of Japanese songs. The spaciousness of the music leaves room for expression to tenorist Matthieu Bordenave and pianist Walter Lang. Bordenave has a deceptively fragile tenor tone, of considerable emotional impact, and Lang is a very subtle player, patiently shoring up the whole context. Together the three players have created something special and new.
Shinya Fukumori, born in Osaka in 1984, played violin, piano and guitar before taking up drums at 15. Two years later he moved to the US, studying at Brookhaven College and the University of Texas at Arlington, completing his formal musical education at Boston’s Berklee College. After playing a great deal of in-the-tradition jazz and powering a number of big bands, he says that he found himself yearning for “something more floating. I wanted more dialogues.” Exposure to Keith Jarrett’s My Song album led to an interest in ECM’s recordings and in diverse European approaches to improvisational music-making. He cites Ketil Bjørnstad’s The Sea and Eberhard Weber’s Silent Feet as particular inspirations. Determining that he would one day record for ECM and work with Manfred Eicher, he decided to move to Munich “without knowing anyone at all in Europe” at that time.
To prepare for the move he went back to Osaka for a while, where he was encouraged by the “two Akis” of the title track, both of them at Interplay 8, a jazz club with a long history, which once provided support for the young Yosuke Yamashita when few others were listening. Shinya Fukumori: “They believed in me and my music, and took care of me until I left for Europe. ‘For 2 Akis’ was one of the first rubato-type compositions I wrote, and among the first pieces that the trio played together. We feel it really represents the group.”
It was also in Osaka that Shinya first heard Walter Lang, when the Swabian pianist was there with his own trio. “Walter is somewhat known in Japan, and so I went to his concert, and fell in love with the simple but strong and unique melodies in his playing.”
At a jam session in Munich, Shinya got to play with French saxophonist Matthieu Bordenave: “I loved his tone, and we’ve developed a really close connection in the music. His approach and playing are like floating on a river. Both Walter and Matthieu really appreciate Japanese culture, and with their support I feel very confident in the music.”
Each of the musicians contributes fine-spun pieces to the trio repertoire, and on For 2 AkisShinya has also brought in Japanese pieces of the Shōwa era (1926-89) which have a special resonance for him: “One of the most important music forms of this period is Shōwa Kayō, the folk/pop music of the Shōwa era. After World War II, when the country was very poor, people would sing folk songs - sometimes to forget about their situation, or to cry over it. Music was a way to escape from the reality, but at the same time to be aware of it. Although the sound is completely different, the way the music has influenced the people is equivalent, in my mind, to American blues. The folk songs of the period are usually very sad and nostalgic, and the music still touches our hearts. My parents and grandparents sang these songs. So I basically grew up listening to Shōwa Kayō.
“I always wanted to create music using Shōwa elements, so I started arranging Shōwa folk songs for the trio in the style of European improvisational music with my own voice. It’s worked out well, and leaves so much space in the music…”
The album begins and ends with Kenji Miyazawa’s “Hoshi Meguri No Uta” (“The Star-Circling Song”). Poet, author, farmer, and cellist Miyazawa (1896-1933), perhaps best-known for his surreal children’s books, wrote few songs. This one says Shinya “has an atmosphere of mystical space. I feel close to his works and the world he creates in his writings and music.”
One of the much-loved songs of the Shōwa period is “Ai San San” written by Kei Ogura (born 1944) and made famous by legendary diva Hibari Misora (1937-89). Matthieu Bordenave wrings a lot of feeling from its melody in the trio’s interpretation.
For Western jazz listeners the most familiar song here may be “Kojo No Tsuki” by Rentaro Taki: Thelonious Monk performed this piece (as “Japanese Folk Song”) on his Straight, No Chaseralbum. Shinya: “Every Japanese child learns this song at school. The melody of the song is very Japanese, so it stands out and still sounds very authentic even though I have re-harmonized it and arranged it.” Shinya Fukumori incorporates the piece into his “Light Suite” here, and it segues into his own compositions.
The other “cover version” here, “Mangetsu No Yube” (“Full Moon Night”), written by Tagashi Nakagawa and Hiroshi Yamaguchi after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995, is a song of hope for dark times. “It’s important for me to play the song to remember,” says Shinya. “Plus, I just want to play the music because it’s a beautiful song.”
The Shinya Fukumori Trio is a Munich-based band - actually the first Munich-based jazz group on ECM since the Mal Waldron Trio of the early 1970s – and all three of its members are leaders in their own right, active on the local scene as well as internationally. Walter Lang has extensive experience of playing duos with Lee Konitz (which led last autumn to Konitz guesting with Matthieu Bordenave’s quartet, with Shinya on drums). Bordenave, furthermore, leads the group Grand Angle with Peter Omara, Henning Sieverts and Shinya Fukumori, and plays duos with guitarist Geoff Goodman.
For 2 Akis was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in March 2017, and produced by Manfred Eicher. The trio is playing in both Europe and Japan in the coming months.
ECM
Nicolas Masson
Travelers
Nicolas Masson: tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet
Colin Vallon: piano
Patrice Moret: double bass
Lionel Friedli: drums
Release date: February 16, 2018
ECM 2578
B0027934-02
UPC: 6025 670 5808 3
After two well-received ECM albums in the cooperative trio Third Reel, leading Swiss reedman Nicolas Masson now presents his own quartet, with Colin Vallon, Patrice Moret and Lionel Friedli. The group has existed for twelve years already, touring as Nicolas Masson’s Parallels, with unchanged personnel and metamorphosing musical influences and priorities. It’s a group of friends, firstly, Masson emphasises. All compositions are by the leader but, as he says, “what’s special about the band, I believe, is the alchemy between the four of us, what happens when we play together.”
Masson’s thoughtful writing for the group does not seek to draw attention to itself, but it continues to encourage fresh responses from the players: “For the quartet I like to have the possibility of writing the simplest melody as a unique starting point for improvisations or more complex rhythmic, harmonic and contrapuntal structures to play on.” Characteristically, at least two of the quartet members adhere to the compositional structure at any given time while the others are free to roam around it or to go exploring. Pianist Colin Vallon and bassist Patrice Moret, play differently here. ECM listeners will know these musicians from Vallon’s own trio and from Elina Duni’s group. Masson’s concept prompts more soloistic activity, and there is a special pleasure in the interplay between piano and saxophone here, as on the title track. In the mutating landscapes which these travellers negotiate you will also find some of Vallon’s prettiest ballad playing (see “Almost Forty”, for instance), richly melodic bass from Moret, and always alert and detailed drumming from Lionel Friedli, whose tom-toms, gongs and metals get a powerful feature on “The Deep.” Constant factors through the album – and throughout the history of the band – are Masson’s lean-toned saxophone and elegant clarinet.
Nonetheless, twelve years is a long time in the life of an improvising group and much has changed along the way. When Nicolas Masson started the band he was inspired, he says, by Tim Berne’s writing, and juxtaposing that influence with ideas from rock, while also looking to Miles Davis’s sixties quintet as an optimum model for a balance of improvisation and composition. In the early days, when the group’s music was more groove and ostinato-driven, Vallon played just Fender Rhodes in the line-up, and textures were thicker and heavier (the 2009 album Thirty Six Ghosts documents the period). Masson subsequently fine-tuned his writing in concurrent projects, including a quartet with Ben Monder, Patrice Moret and Ted Poor, and the aforementioned Third Reel: “Recording the two ECM albums with Third Reel inspired me to think a lot about musical expression and aesthetics. I was trying to find a way to simplify or clarify the written material to communicate on a deeper level.”
Contemporary composition had long been an interest; now, Masson also listened to earlier music of the classical tradition, including baroque music, for lyrical inspiration and formal concepts. “I wanted a more singing, melodic approach and operas and arias by Handel, Telemann and Purcell helped me to renew my approach to saxophone playing and offered new inspirations in writing, too. I was also hearing something more organic and natural.” Hence the drift to acoustic instruments.
Masson’s artistic growth has been stimulated by some important encounters. At the age of 20 he met Cecil Taylor, J.R. Mitchell and Fred Hopkins in New York, which led to studies with Frank Lowe and Makanda Ken McIntyre. At the end of the 1990s, he returned to the US to study with Chris Potter and Rich Perry. He has played with Ben Monder, Kenny Wheeler, Josh Roseman, Otomo Yoshihide, Clarence Penn, Kris Davis, Thomas Morgan, Scott DuBois, Gerald Cleaver, Tom Arthurs, Samuel Blaser, Manuel Mengis, Susanne Abbuehl, and many others. Of his tunes on Travelers, Masson says, “I wrote each song in relation to someone I’ve known. These pieces are not musical portraits of these people, but a reaction to their specific energy…”
Music is paralleled in significance in Masson’s life by photography and the two arts have had a kind of symbiotic relationship for him. Working at the opera house in Geneva as a stage photographer was once a means to pay for studies at the city’s Conservatoire Populaire de Musique (where master-class teachers included Lee Konitz, Dave Douglas and Misha Mengelberg). Today he feels that his photography and music “feed off each other. Taking pictures helps me to understand what I react to, what inspires me, what energies I’m drawn to…The pieces that I write for the quartet are related to the experiences, impressions and moods I try to channel using music and photography.” A number of ECM covers and booklets have featured Masson’s images in recent years, in styles from landscapes and abstract pictures to musician portraits. Examples include Heinz Holliger’s Aschenmusik, the Colin Vallon Trio’s Le Vent and Danse, Elina Duni’s Dallëndyshe, Third Reel’s Many More Days, and now Travelers.
Travelers was recorded at Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano in April 2017, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
ECM
Norma Winstone
Descansado
Songs for Films
Norma Winstone: voice
Klaus Gesing: bass clarinet, soprano saxophone
Glauco Venier: piano
Helge Andreas Norbakken: percussion
Mario Brunello: violoncello, violoncello piccolo
Release date: February 16, 2018
ECM 2567
B0027937-02
UPC: 6025 578 6989 7
For its fourth ECM album, a creative journey into the world of film music, Norma Winstone’s trio with Klaus Gesing and Glauco Venier is augmented by guests Helge Andreas Norbakken and Mario Brunello. Together they explore music written by Nino Rota, Michel Legrand, William Walton, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Armando Trovajoli, Rodrigo Leão, Luis Bacalov and Dario Marianelli for the movies of Scorsese, Godard, Wenders, Jewison, Zeffirelli, Olivier and more.
Descansado, named after Trovajoli’s regretful-yet-buoyant tune for Vittorio De Sica’s 1963 filmYesterday, Today and Tomorrow, is an album that works on several levels. Thoroughly involving as a set of graceful songs, it also invites the listener to reflect on the creative relationships between directors and composers, and the many ways in which music so often subtly contributes to the emotional tone of a film.
Some of the pieces here count as classics of the film song genre, among them Nina Rota’s “What Is A Youth” and Michel Legrand’s “His Eyes, Her Eyes”, transformed in the performances by Winstone and company. For six of the songs Norma has written new words.
As well as being one of the great contemporary jazz singers, Winstone has long been a sensitive lyricist, and her song texts often capture a moment or a mood in a way that might well be described as filmic. And so it is here, with her stories of love and loss conveyed through a look, a gesture or a touch. In their fresh arrangements, Venier and Gesing expand upon both the atmosphere of the film in question and the feeling embodied in Norma’s lyrics.
William Walton’s “Touch Her Soft Lips And Part”, originally written for Laurence Olivier’s version of Shakespeare’s Henry V, is a piece that John Taylor (with Kenny Wheeler one of the album’s dedicatees) used to play (Taylor’s interpretation of the tune can be heard on As It Is by the Peter Erskine Trio). Norma’s words for it encompass more than a film’s scene: “All of his magic/Still lives in her mind/All the sounds and images/Slowly rewind.” Mario Brunello’s cello underscores the song’s sentiment.
Sometimes, following her own instincts, Winstone finds new associations for a well-known melody, and Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver becomes melancholy rather than ominous as Norma sketches another picture of mean streets: “The siren’s lullaby/Goes on into the night/Relentless and mournful, it never ends.”
Italian cellist Mario Brunello, whose own recordings have encompassed music from Bach to Ligeti, works a wide scope of music on this album, too, even conjuring a sense of the English countryside on the folk-flavored theme of “Meryton Townhall” from Joe Wright’s film based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Here, and on themes for Wim Wenders’s Lisbon Story and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie(added spontaneously to the program in the course of the recording session) Norma uses her voice wordlessly, as a pure instrument, as she did back in the 1970s when she made her ECM debut in the Azimuth trio with Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor.
In fact, from the beginning of her life in jazz, Norma Winstone has wanted to be part of the ensemble, rather than a frontwoman – interweaving improvised lines with her partners and participating in the blossoming harmony. When singing texts, she draws her fellow musicians ever deeper into the storylines sketched by the lyrics, until the plot is illuminated from multiple perspectives. On Descansado this is true for the guest musicians as well as for Gesing and Venier, who have worked with Norma for more than fifteen years: their first trio album was Chamber Music, recorded for Universal in 2002, followed by the Grammy nominated Distances (2007), Stories Yet To Tell (2009) and Dance Without Answer (2012).
Norma’s other ECM albums include Somewhere Called Home (recorded in 1986 with John Taylor and Tony Coe), and five albums with Azimuth, recorded between 1979 and 1994. She can also be heard on Kenny Wheeler’s Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990) and Eberhard Weber’s Fluid Rustle(1979).
ECM
Andy Sheppard Quartet
Romaria
Andy Sheppard: tenor and soprano saxophones
Eivind Aarset: guitar
Michel Benita: double bass
Sebastian Rochford: drums
Release: February 16, 2017
ECM 2577
B0027932-02
UPC CD: 6025 578 6980 4
UPC LP 180g: 6025 673 0185 1
Romaria is the latest chapter in a musical story that began with saxophonist Andy Sheppard’s free-flowing Trio Libero recording with bassist Michel Benita and drummer Sebastian Rochford back in 2011. The creative understanding between the three highly-individual protagonists was unmissable. For the subsequent album Surrounded by Sea, recorded in 2014, Eivind Aarset was added on guitar and electronics, bringing the group to quartet size and broadening its work method. As Sheppard explained to UK website Jazz Views, “I wanted to take what I was doing with Trio Libero and add the harmonies that I can hear in my head when playing with just bass and drums. Eivind is an amazing ‘orchestral’ voice with exquisite taste – the perfect choice for this role.” In an interview with Jazzwise magazine, Sheppard went further: “The sound-world that I have with this quartet is my dream band.” US magazine Jazz Times called the quartet’s music “impressionistic yet suffused with piercing emotional clarity,” a description also applicable for Romaria.
In this new program of compositions by Andy Sheppard (plus the title track by Brazilian singer-songwriter Renato Teixeira) the drones and washes of Eivind Aarset’s guitar and electronics once again help to establish a climate in which improvisation can take place. There’s a highly atmospheric, ambient drift to the music which Sheppard clearly finds liberating, as do Michel Benita and Seb Rochford, free to move in and out of conventional rhythm section roles and to make impassioned statements of their own. And there is also drive: rubato and propulsive elements can co-exist and overlap in Sheppard’s musical universe, see for instance “Thirteen,” “They Came From The North” and “All Becomes Again”, all distinguished by dynamic interaction.
“I wanted to continue the atmosphere of Surrounded by Sea,” says Andy Sheppard, “and write music which would bring out the wonderful musicality of Eivind, Seb and Michel and also make the core a little more robust, with more of an emphasis on groove and energy than the last album.”
The opening and closing tracks were originally two versions of a slowly-unfolding ballad entitled “Forever and a Day”, both featuring gentle saxophone by the leader and melodic bass from Michel Benita against minimalistic drums and Aarset’s halo of sounds: “Manfred’s inspired idea of using both takes to open and close the session made me retitle the music accordingly.”
“With Every Flower That Falls” belongs to a suite of music that Sheppard was commissioned to write as a “live score” to accompany a screening of Fritz Lang’s prophetic science-fiction classicMetropolis at the Bristol International Jazz Festival (where it was performed with a ten piece ensemble with Sheppard, Aarset and Michele Rabbia among the soloists).
Title track “Romaria” was recommended to Andy Sheppard by his wife Sara: “She suggested I explore it, and played me the wonderful version by Ellis Regina, which of course I fell in love with immediately. For me, it also ties in with our recent relocation to Portugal, land of sunshine and saudades, two things that I hope the listener will find on this recording…”
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Andy Sheppard’s first leader date for ECM was the 2008 recording Movements In Colour(where Eivind Aarset was one of the featured guitarists). In addition to the aforementioned Trio Libero album Sheppard can also be heard with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow on Trios(recorded 2012) and Andando el Tiempo (2015) and on ten of Carla Bley’s albums on the ECM distributed WATT label, beginning with Fleur Carnivore in 1988. Sheppard has written music for ensembles of every size including his Saxophone Massive project with up to 200 players, and been featured as soloist with great jazz composers and arrangers including George Russell and Gil Evans.
Andy Sheppard and Michel Benita have been crossing paths since the 1980s. In 2008 Sheppard, Benita and Sebastian Rochford came together in a project at the Coutances Jazz Festival in northern France. It was here that Sheppard first glimpsed the potential of this particular musical combination.
Seb Rochford, whose interest in jazz was first sparked by witnessing an Andy Sheppard concert in Aberdeen, has meanwhile made his own distinctive contributions to the genre with his bands including Polar Bear. Rochford’s resumé has embraced work with everyone from Brian Eno to Herbie Hancock, from Patti Smith to Matana Roberts.
Each quartet member is also a bandleader in his own right, and Michel Benita, French bassist born in Algiers, recorded the album River Silver with his Ethics band (featuring Eivind Aarset, Matthieu Michel, and koto player Mieko Miyazaki) for ECM in 2015. Benita has played with numerous jazz musicians including Dewey Redman, Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz, Kenny Wheeler, Joe Lovano, Steve Kuhn, Michel Portal and many more.
Eivind Aarset’s ECM album Dream Logic was released in 2012. It was followed by Atmosphèreswith an improvising quartet with Tigran Hamasyan, Arve Henriksen and Jan Bang. Other ECM appearances include Nils Petter Molvӕr’s influential Khmer and Solid Ether, Small Labyrinthswith Marilyn Mazur’s Future Song, Arild Andersen’s Electra, John Hassell’s Last Night The Moon Came…, Ketil Bjørnstad’s La Notte, and Food’s Mercurial Balm.
Romaria was recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo in April 2017 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
ECM
Shinya Fukumori Trio
For 2 Akis
Matthieu Bordenave: tenor saxophone
Walter Lang: piano
Shinya Fukumori: drums
Release date: February 16, 2018
ECM 2574
B0027936-02
UPC: 6025 578 8817 1
For 2 Akis is the ECM debut for a Japanese-French-German trio with a lyrical sound of its own. Drummer-leader Shinya Fukumori, also the principal composer for the band, is an imaginative melodist at several levels, and the attention to timbre and detail and space which distinguishes his drumming is also reflected in the color-fields of his free-floating ballads, and his adaptations and arrangements of Japanese songs. The spaciousness of the music leaves room for expression to tenorist Matthieu Bordenave and pianist Walter Lang. Bordenave has a deceptively fragile tenor tone, of considerable emotional impact, and Lang is a very subtle player, patiently shoring up the whole context. Together the three players have created something special and new.
Shinya Fukumori, born in Osaka in 1984, played violin, piano and guitar before taking up drums at 15. Two years later he moved to the US, studying at Brookhaven College and the University of Texas at Arlington, completing his formal musical education at Boston’s Berklee College. After playing a great deal of in-the-tradition jazz and powering a number of big bands, he says that he found himself yearning for “something more floating. I wanted more dialogues.” Exposure to Keith Jarrett’s My Song album led to an interest in ECM’s recordings and in diverse European approaches to improvisational music-making. He cites Ketil Bjørnstad’s The Sea and Eberhard Weber’s Silent Feet as particular inspirations. Determining that he would one day record for ECM and work with Manfred Eicher, he decided to move to Munich “without knowing anyone at all in Europe” at that time.
To prepare for the move he went back to Osaka for a while, where he was encouraged by the “two Akis” of the title track, both of them at Interplay 8, a jazz club with a long history, which once provided support for the young Yosuke Yamashita when few others were listening. Shinya Fukumori: “They believed in me and my music, and took care of me until I left for Europe. ‘For 2 Akis’ was one of the first rubato-type compositions I wrote, and among the first pieces that the trio played together. We feel it really represents the group.”
It was also in Osaka that Shinya first heard Walter Lang, when the Swabian pianist was there with his own trio. “Walter is somewhat known in Japan, and so I went to his concert, and fell in love with the simple but strong and unique melodies in his playing.”
At a jam session in Munich, Shinya got to play with French saxophonist Matthieu Bordenave: “I loved his tone, and we’ve developed a really close connection in the music. His approach and playing are like floating on a river. Both Walter and Matthieu really appreciate Japanese culture, and with their support I feel very confident in the music.”
Each of the musicians contributes fine-spun pieces to the trio repertoire, and on For 2 AkisShinya has also brought in Japanese pieces of the Shōwa era (1926-89) which have a special resonance for him: “One of the most important music forms of this period is Shōwa Kayō, the folk/pop music of the Shōwa era. After World War II, when the country was very poor, people would sing folk songs - sometimes to forget about their situation, or to cry over it. Music was a way to escape from the reality, but at the same time to be aware of it. Although the sound is completely different, the way the music has influenced the people is equivalent, in my mind, to American blues. The folk songs of the period are usually very sad and nostalgic, and the music still touches our hearts. My parents and grandparents sang these songs. So I basically grew up listening to Shōwa Kayō.
“I always wanted to create music using Shōwa elements, so I started arranging Shōwa folk songs for the trio in the style of European improvisational music with my own voice. It’s worked out well, and leaves so much space in the music…”
The album begins and ends with Kenji Miyazawa’s “Hoshi Meguri No Uta” (“The Star-Circling Song”). Poet, author, farmer, and cellist Miyazawa (1896-1933), perhaps best-known for his surreal children’s books, wrote few songs. This one says Shinya “has an atmosphere of mystical space. I feel close to his works and the world he creates in his writings and music.”
One of the much-loved songs of the Shōwa period is “Ai San San” written by Kei Ogura (born 1944) and made famous by legendary diva Hibari Misora (1937-89). Matthieu Bordenave wrings a lot of feeling from its melody in the trio’s interpretation.
For Western jazz listeners the most familiar song here may be “Kojo No Tsuki” by Rentaro Taki: Thelonious Monk performed this piece (as “Japanese Folk Song”) on his Straight, No Chaseralbum. Shinya: “Every Japanese child learns this song at school. The melody of the song is very Japanese, so it stands out and still sounds very authentic even though I have re-harmonized it and arranged it.” Shinya Fukumori incorporates the piece into his “Light Suite” here, and it segues into his own compositions.
The other “cover version” here, “Mangetsu No Yube” (“Full Moon Night”), written by Tagashi Nakagawa and Hiroshi Yamaguchi after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995, is a song of hope for dark times. “It’s important for me to play the song to remember,” says Shinya. “Plus, I just want to play the music because it’s a beautiful song.”
The Shinya Fukumori Trio is a Munich-based band - actually the first Munich-based jazz group on ECM since the Mal Waldron Trio of the early 1970s – and all three of its members are leaders in their own right, active on the local scene as well as internationally. Walter Lang has extensive experience of playing duos with Lee Konitz (which led last autumn to Konitz guesting with Matthieu Bordenave’s quartet, with Shinya on drums). Bordenave, furthermore, leads the group Grand Angle with Peter Omara, Henning Sieverts and Shinya Fukumori, and plays duos with guitarist Geoff Goodman.
For 2 Akis was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France in March 2017, and produced by Manfred Eicher. The trio is playing in both Europe and Japan in the coming months.
ECM
Nicolas Masson
Travelers
Nicolas Masson: tenor and soprano saxophones, clarinet
Colin Vallon: piano
Patrice Moret: double bass
Lionel Friedli: drums
Release date: February 16, 2018
ECM 2578
B0027934-02
UPC: 6025 670 5808 3
After two well-received ECM albums in the cooperative trio Third Reel, leading Swiss reedman Nicolas Masson now presents his own quartet, with Colin Vallon, Patrice Moret and Lionel Friedli. The group has existed for twelve years already, touring as Nicolas Masson’s Parallels, with unchanged personnel and metamorphosing musical influences and priorities. It’s a group of friends, firstly, Masson emphasises. All compositions are by the leader but, as he says, “what’s special about the band, I believe, is the alchemy between the four of us, what happens when we play together.”
Masson’s thoughtful writing for the group does not seek to draw attention to itself, but it continues to encourage fresh responses from the players: “For the quartet I like to have the possibility of writing the simplest melody as a unique starting point for improvisations or more complex rhythmic, harmonic and contrapuntal structures to play on.” Characteristically, at least two of the quartet members adhere to the compositional structure at any given time while the others are free to roam around it or to go exploring. Pianist Colin Vallon and bassist Patrice Moret, play differently here. ECM listeners will know these musicians from Vallon’s own trio and from Elina Duni’s group. Masson’s concept prompts more soloistic activity, and there is a special pleasure in the interplay between piano and saxophone here, as on the title track. In the mutating landscapes which these travellers negotiate you will also find some of Vallon’s prettiest ballad playing (see “Almost Forty”, for instance), richly melodic bass from Moret, and always alert and detailed drumming from Lionel Friedli, whose tom-toms, gongs and metals get a powerful feature on “The Deep.” Constant factors through the album – and throughout the history of the band – are Masson’s lean-toned saxophone and elegant clarinet.
Nonetheless, twelve years is a long time in the life of an improvising group and much has changed along the way. When Nicolas Masson started the band he was inspired, he says, by Tim Berne’s writing, and juxtaposing that influence with ideas from rock, while also looking to Miles Davis’s sixties quintet as an optimum model for a balance of improvisation and composition. In the early days, when the group’s music was more groove and ostinato-driven, Vallon played just Fender Rhodes in the line-up, and textures were thicker and heavier (the 2009 album Thirty Six Ghosts documents the period). Masson subsequently fine-tuned his writing in concurrent projects, including a quartet with Ben Monder, Patrice Moret and Ted Poor, and the aforementioned Third Reel: “Recording the two ECM albums with Third Reel inspired me to think a lot about musical expression and aesthetics. I was trying to find a way to simplify or clarify the written material to communicate on a deeper level.”
Contemporary composition had long been an interest; now, Masson also listened to earlier music of the classical tradition, including baroque music, for lyrical inspiration and formal concepts. “I wanted a more singing, melodic approach and operas and arias by Handel, Telemann and Purcell helped me to renew my approach to saxophone playing and offered new inspirations in writing, too. I was also hearing something more organic and natural.” Hence the drift to acoustic instruments.
Masson’s artistic growth has been stimulated by some important encounters. At the age of 20 he met Cecil Taylor, J.R. Mitchell and Fred Hopkins in New York, which led to studies with Frank Lowe and Makanda Ken McIntyre. At the end of the 1990s, he returned to the US to study with Chris Potter and Rich Perry. He has played with Ben Monder, Kenny Wheeler, Josh Roseman, Otomo Yoshihide, Clarence Penn, Kris Davis, Thomas Morgan, Scott DuBois, Gerald Cleaver, Tom Arthurs, Samuel Blaser, Manuel Mengis, Susanne Abbuehl, and many others. Of his tunes on Travelers, Masson says, “I wrote each song in relation to someone I’ve known. These pieces are not musical portraits of these people, but a reaction to their specific energy…”
Music is paralleled in significance in Masson’s life by photography and the two arts have had a kind of symbiotic relationship for him. Working at the opera house in Geneva as a stage photographer was once a means to pay for studies at the city’s Conservatoire Populaire de Musique (where master-class teachers included Lee Konitz, Dave Douglas and Misha Mengelberg). Today he feels that his photography and music “feed off each other. Taking pictures helps me to understand what I react to, what inspires me, what energies I’m drawn to…The pieces that I write for the quartet are related to the experiences, impressions and moods I try to channel using music and photography.” A number of ECM covers and booklets have featured Masson’s images in recent years, in styles from landscapes and abstract pictures to musician portraits. Examples include Heinz Holliger’s Aschenmusik, the Colin Vallon Trio’s Le Vent and Danse, Elina Duni’s Dallëndyshe, Third Reel’s Many More Days, and now Travelers.
Travelers was recorded at Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano in April 2017, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
ECM
Norma Winstone
Descansado
Songs for Films
Norma Winstone: voice
Klaus Gesing: bass clarinet, soprano saxophone
Glauco Venier: piano
Helge Andreas Norbakken: percussion
Mario Brunello: violoncello, violoncello piccolo
Release date: February 16, 2018
ECM 2567
B0027937-02
UPC: 6025 578 6989 7
For its fourth ECM album, a creative journey into the world of film music, Norma Winstone’s trio with Klaus Gesing and Glauco Venier is augmented by guests Helge Andreas Norbakken and Mario Brunello. Together they explore music written by Nino Rota, Michel Legrand, William Walton, Bernard Herrmann, Ennio Morricone, Armando Trovajoli, Rodrigo Leão, Luis Bacalov and Dario Marianelli for the movies of Scorsese, Godard, Wenders, Jewison, Zeffirelli, Olivier and more.
Descansado, named after Trovajoli’s regretful-yet-buoyant tune for Vittorio De Sica’s 1963 filmYesterday, Today and Tomorrow, is an album that works on several levels. Thoroughly involving as a set of graceful songs, it also invites the listener to reflect on the creative relationships between directors and composers, and the many ways in which music so often subtly contributes to the emotional tone of a film.
Some of the pieces here count as classics of the film song genre, among them Nina Rota’s “What Is A Youth” and Michel Legrand’s “His Eyes, Her Eyes”, transformed in the performances by Winstone and company. For six of the songs Norma has written new words.
As well as being one of the great contemporary jazz singers, Winstone has long been a sensitive lyricist, and her song texts often capture a moment or a mood in a way that might well be described as filmic. And so it is here, with her stories of love and loss conveyed through a look, a gesture or a touch. In their fresh arrangements, Venier and Gesing expand upon both the atmosphere of the film in question and the feeling embodied in Norma’s lyrics.
William Walton’s “Touch Her Soft Lips And Part”, originally written for Laurence Olivier’s version of Shakespeare’s Henry V, is a piece that John Taylor (with Kenny Wheeler one of the album’s dedicatees) used to play (Taylor’s interpretation of the tune can be heard on As It Is by the Peter Erskine Trio). Norma’s words for it encompass more than a film’s scene: “All of his magic/Still lives in her mind/All the sounds and images/Slowly rewind.” Mario Brunello’s cello underscores the song’s sentiment.
Sometimes, following her own instincts, Winstone finds new associations for a well-known melody, and Bernard Herrmann’s theme for Scorsese’s Taxi Driver becomes melancholy rather than ominous as Norma sketches another picture of mean streets: “The siren’s lullaby/Goes on into the night/Relentless and mournful, it never ends.”
Italian cellist Mario Brunello, whose own recordings have encompassed music from Bach to Ligeti, works a wide scope of music on this album, too, even conjuring a sense of the English countryside on the folk-flavored theme of “Meryton Townhall” from Joe Wright’s film based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Here, and on themes for Wim Wenders’s Lisbon Story and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie(added spontaneously to the program in the course of the recording session) Norma uses her voice wordlessly, as a pure instrument, as she did back in the 1970s when she made her ECM debut in the Azimuth trio with Kenny Wheeler and John Taylor.
In fact, from the beginning of her life in jazz, Norma Winstone has wanted to be part of the ensemble, rather than a frontwoman – interweaving improvised lines with her partners and participating in the blossoming harmony. When singing texts, she draws her fellow musicians ever deeper into the storylines sketched by the lyrics, until the plot is illuminated from multiple perspectives. On Descansado this is true for the guest musicians as well as for Gesing and Venier, who have worked with Norma for more than fifteen years: their first trio album was Chamber Music, recorded for Universal in 2002, followed by the Grammy nominated Distances (2007), Stories Yet To Tell (2009) and Dance Without Answer (2012).
Norma’s other ECM albums include Somewhere Called Home (recorded in 1986 with John Taylor and Tony Coe), and five albums with Azimuth, recorded between 1979 and 1994. She can also be heard on Kenny Wheeler’s Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990) and Eberhard Weber’s Fluid Rustle(1979).