Released in 2013, this two-disc set is a welcome addition to ECM’s obscure constellation of compilations, not least because it draws generously from the label’s New Series imprint. Such recordings are often omitted when anthologies favor the jazz-oriented catalogue. Here, written music and improvisation pass into one another with scarcely a seam. A year appears through fragments, each marking a different nuance of time.

My delight is immediate when the sequence opens with “Un Dia De Noviembre,” from classical guitarist Zsófia Boros’s En otra parte (ECM New Series 2328). Leo Brouwer’s composition sets a high standard of narrative mastery. Boros retrieves each phrase from an interior country whose borders recede whenever touched. Her instrument speaks with the lucid privacy of handwriting found in an abandoned room. Stefano Scodanibbio’s music follows through Reinventions (ECM New Series 2072), offering his arrangement of “Bésame mucho,” which he considered the most beautiful song ever written. The string quartet subjects the familiar melody to graceful refraction. Desire enters a laboratory of counterpoint and emerges plural.

Another first arrives with String Paths (ECM New Series 2239), which introduced many hungry ears to Dobrinka Tabakova. We hear the opening movement of her Suite in Old Style, written in 2006 for solo viola, harpsichord, and strings, a live performance of which inspired Manfred Eicher to bring her into the ECM fold. Antiquity passes through the piece without becoming ornamental. Alongside it stands the almighty Adagio from Barber’s Op. 11 String Quartet, performed with tactful restraint by the Keller Quartett on Ligeti String Quartets / Barber Adagio (ECM New Series 2197). Each ascent acquires gravity until grief becomes almost indistinguishable from concentration.

The final classical selection comes from the Dowland Project’s Night Sessions (ECM New Series 2018), on which tenor John Potter brings playful charge to the anonymous 15th-century song “Swart Mekerd Smethes.” From here, the sequence shifts to ECM proper, its commitment to storytelling intact. Mat Maneri’s solo rendition of “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen,” taken from Transylvanian Concert (ECM 2313), forms a natural bridge between territories that marketing prefers to separate. His viola wavers at the edge of creation, searching the string for whatever pain has survived its big bang.

Genre becomes increasingly irrelevant in the improvisation from Kayhan Kalhor and Erdal Erzincan’s Kula Kulluk Yakışır Mı (ECM 2181). Kamancheh and baglama enter a shared field where individual utterance dissolves into collective motion. Further mysteries await in Iva Bittová’s self-titled album (ECM 2275), combining violin and voice in a crystalline, charcoal-infused fragrance of autopoetics. Bittová builds the music while becoming the only soul capable of performing it.

The first disc closes with “Lassie Lie Near Me,” as rendered on Quercus (ECM 2276). June Tabor sings with little affectation beyond the emotional veracity of her diction. Saxophonist Iain Ballamy harmonizes, while pianist Huw Warren extends the melody into the spaces between its sentences. The song’s fractures carry its truest history.

Disc two opens with Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, and Andy Sheppard. In “Vashkar,” from Trios (ECM 2287), Sheppard’s silken soprano saxophone releases fluid moon-bursts and agile arpeggios that never exceed their emotional necessity. Swallow’s spinal bass stitches the piece together while Bley rearranges the harmonic furniture, turning corners into entrances. Susanne Abbuehl’s “This And My Heart,” her setting of Emily Dickinson from The Gift (ECM 2322), brings in deeper shadows. Voice and flugelhorn occupy the space opened by the poem, where meaning becomes too precise for explanation.

The collection moves into more distinctly improvisational territory with the Craig Taborn Trio’s Chants (ECM 2326). The pianist’s original “Beat The Ground” summons blurred foliage at the edge of a running warrior’s vision. Pulse-driven spirals gather around the trio’s resonant core, and several systems of thought operate inside the same gesture. Energy continues in “Furious Seasons,” composed by Emanuele Maniscalco, drummer for Third Reel, whose self-titled debut (ECM 2314) also features guitarist Roberto Pianca and saxophonist Nicolas Masson. The tune compresses turbulence into propulsive motion with cool intelligence.

A beautiful interlude arrives through Ralph Alessi’s Baida (ECM 2321), whose own title track offers a soft rubato landing. Alessi’s trumpet illuminates the air from within, giving shape to pauses another performance might treat as absence. We are then immersed in the title track from the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble’s Outstairs (ECM 2289). This chamber music reveals clockwork in every rustling gesture and reedy song. Even more tenderness awaits in Azure (ECM 2292), also represented by its title track. Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell create melody released from ownership.

A textural shift comes with “Father Time,” from Travel Guide (ECM 2310), which brings together guitarists Ralph Towner, Wolfgang Muthspiel, and Slava Grigoryan. Their fragile coloratura reveals an art of transparency. Lines cross without tangling, producing a lattice whose empty spaces carry as much meaning as its beams. Much of that essence appears in the Julia Hülsmann Quartet’s “In Full View,” taken from the album of the same name (ECM 2306). This bop-leaning vehicle moves with alertness rather than haste, each phrase revising the conditions under which the next can exist. “Melancholy Baby,” from the John Abercrombie Quartet’s 39 Steps (ECM 2334), follows with an off-kilter treatment of the standard.

The collection concludes with “Caprichos De Espanha,” an original tune by bandolim maestro Hamilton De Holanda, who joins pianist Stefano Bollani on O que serȧ (ECM 2332). Their exchange offers mosaicked splendor, quick and disciplined by microscopic attention. Ideas arrive already in motion, each opening into another before it can congeal into something trappable.

Across these two discs, Fragments Of A Year gradually sheds the ordinary meaning of its title. Brouwer’s inward guitar, Barber’s ascending grief, Bittová’s self-inventing language, and Taborn’s muscular abstractions become organs within one impossible body. The compilation’s unity comes from ECM’s faith in recording as attention, spacious enough for the smallest gesture to acquire consequence. These recordings belong to 2013, yet the year becomes incidental, a temporary address assigned to sounds still developing beyond it. Listening closely, one senses time relinquishing authority and becoming material, something bowed, plucked, breathed through, and broken open. Somewhere inside that rupture, the future acquires a memory of us.