Atmosphères

Tigran Hamasyan piano
Arve Henriksen trumpet
Eivind Aarset guitar
Jan Bang live sampling, samples
Recorded June 2014, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
U.S. release date: September 9, 2016

As is common to ECM’s finest recordings of this century, Atmosphères represents the spirit of producer Manfred Eicher through its seemingly inevitable unfolding. Eicher is a listener above all, and his ability to coax that same level of regard from and between musicians in the studio, when it works this well, is marvelous. The label’s penchant for unprecedented collaborations, surprising yet organic by gentle force of suggestion, plays out here in the quartet of Tigran Hamasyan (piano), Arve Henriksen (trumpet), Eivind Aarset (guitar), and Jan Bang (live sampling, samples).

Those familiar with Hamasyan’s work won’t be surprised to find the Armenian pianist planting seeds of his homeland’s most celebrated composer, Komitas Vardapet (1869-1935), into this album’s otherwise spontaneous field. The beloved melodies of “Garun a” and “Tsirani tsar” especially highlight the synergistic core of Henriksen (whose tone often leans toward reed-like registers) and Hamasyan, although it was the latter’s collaborations with Bang at Norway’s Punkt Festival in 2013 that prompted Eicher toward this project’s realization. Concerning Bang’s sampling, whether banked or real-time, in combination with Aarset’s airbrushing it adds depth and vision to the overall soundscape at hand.

Komitas aside, ten freely improvised “Traces” make up the bulk of this two-disc album, and are where the possibilities of this quartet achieve fullest life. The ambience of “Traces I” opens the album on the softest of feet, swelling ever so gradually into audible life. Whether in the intonations of “Traces IV” or the misty layers of “Traces X,” each musician speaks to the other in whispers, true to the album’s titular spirit. Not all is mist and drift, however, as tracks like “Traces II,” “Traces VI,” and “Traces VII” speak of underlying tensions and earthly forces at work in powerful harmony. This restlessness is always at the mercy of some distant prayer, one cradled as a candle from night to dawn, while its flame dances frantically in the wind of unanswerable questions.

(This review originally appeared in the March 2017 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, of which a full PDF is available here.)