Trio Tapestry
Garden of Expression

Joe Lovano tenor and soprano saxophones, tarogato, gongs
Marilyn Crispell piano
Carmen Castaldi drums
Recorded November 2019 Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover Photo: Caterina Di Perri
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 29, 2021

Following in the footsteps of its 2019 self-titled debut, Trio Tapestry returns with an intensely meditative successor. Saxophonist Joe Lovano (playing tenor and soprano, as well as tarogato and gongs), pianist Marilyn Crispell, and drummer Carmen Castaldi take their atmospheric coherence to the next level with this set of eight Lovano originals. His lilting tenor in “Chapel Song” manifests spiritual possibilities from first breath. As piano and brushes render the sky at his back a canvas of lost hopes, keys and time signatures melt into an echo of their former meanings. This nexus of the two Cs functions as the album’s paper, across which Lovano keeps an honest diary in his flowing script.

The notes of “Night Creatures” speak with the power of a supernova, which through a satellite telescope appears peaceful and nebulous but in the moments of its birth was surely violent at the molecular level. Such are the dichotomies being sung, where something as unseeable as the transmission of a virus can bring the world to a virtual standstill. The title track is a melodic wonder, which Crispell cradles as a mother would the head of a newborn. Implications of life dance in “West of the Moon.” With all the understated charge of a Paul Motian tune (and by no force of comparison, given that Lovano played in the drummer’s trio with guitarist Bill Frisell for three decades), it finds contentment not in the fallback of a groove but in the ever-changing currents of air that a groove risks prematurely denying.

Lovano’s tenor enables a study in physical contrast. Between the delicate altissimo of “Sacred Chant” and guttural lows of “Dream on That,” he paints with a variety of liminal shades in the middle range. His soprano in “Zen Like” points to yet another register, speaking in haiku rather than tanka. Any quantifiable border between day and night, except for that delineated by the act of sleep, loses all importance. We are bid to listen with eyes open to the language of a distant solar system. With so much to discover on repeated listening, perhaps no other description could feel so apt as that which names track 5: “Treasured Moments.” Given its focus on the simple and the beautiful, we can take the album’s dedication to victims of COVID-19 as more than a reactionary statement but as a prayer within a prayer.

(A condensed version of this review originally appeared in the July 2021 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)