Julia Hülsmann piano Tom Arthurs trumpet, flugelhorn Marc Muellbauer double bass Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded June 2012 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
The harbor becomes the sea And lighting the house keeps its collision free Understand the lay of the land And don’t let it hurt you or it will be the first to –Feist
After the successes of The End Of A Summer and Imprint, pianist Julia Hülsmann joins bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling for another round, only now with new collaborator Tom Arthurs on trumpet. Arthurs is a musician whose Kenny Wheeler-like feel for color and collaborations with other ECM artists makes him an inevitable fit for the label. Thus reborn, the Julia Hülsmann Quartet leaps into action with swing and vigor.
Much of said vigor comes by way of Muellbauer, whose pen begets the album’s hippest and most atmospheric numbers in kind. In the former vein we have “Quicksilver” and “Dedication,” in which Hülsmann takes the listener on journeys of discovery. In the latter vein, “Gleim” is a noteworthy gem. Between the composer’s soothing intro and Hülsmann’s floating clusters stretches an avenue of muted trumpet, along which Arthurs walks as if humming to himself. Köbberling’s sole offering is “Forever Old,” in which the drummer skims the surface of many oceans while Muellbauer surveys the coast in Arthurs’s footsteps toward a tessellated lighthouse. “Richtung Osten,” by Köbberling’s wife Fumi Udo, throws a narrower spotlight on Muellbauer, who traces peaks and valleys over the band’s rubato mappings.
Hülsmann contributes four tunes, including the bop-leaning title track and the syllogistic highlight, “Spiel.” In each one can hear her fanning approach to improvisation, as also in the photorealistic “Snow, melting.” For more than effect, she throws in two surprises. First is “The Water,” by Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, arranged here for the trio and crafted with subtle assurance. Second is the muted “Nana,” a lullaby from Manuel de Falla’s “Siete Canciones Populares Españolas” cycle.
From beginning to end, In Full View holds true to its vision without error. Fans of the trio are sure to feel right at home among the new company, for Arthurs provides many pleasures along the way, and even an intimate tune of his own: “Forgotten Poetry.” Which is precisely what this album is not. You will want to remember every word.
(To hear samples of In Full View, watch the video above or click here.)
Aaron Parks piano
Recorded November 2011 at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA
Engineer: Rick Kwan
Mixed at Avatar Studios, New York
Produced by Sun Chung
Into the forest again whence all roads depend this way and that to lead him back. –Robert Creeley
Aaron Parks’s solo ECM debut might just as well be called “Arbor Essence.” Not only because each of its 11 improvised tracks grows however it wants to, but also because as a forest they provide shelter from rain and screen against the sun’s blinding rays. The album belongs unquestionably alongside Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel and any number of Keith Jarrett records as a significant contribution to the solo piano archive, though it owes as much to Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Paul Bley.
With so much foliage to reckon with, it’s no wonder Parks begins “Asleep In The Forest.” The apparent expanse of his playing is only enhanced by the engineering, which places us with him among the branches, looking down at the comings and goings of fauna below and wearing moonlight like a shroud. “Toward Awakening” confirms this feeling of night in a dreamlike pulse and builds waves with a surrendering intensity not heard since The Köln Concert. Unlike that classic predecessor, this excursion bleeds in more intimate ways, shared not with an audience of flesh but a congregation of souls. An awakening, yes, but into a realization that one always returns to slumber.
Like the album as a whole, “Past Presence” is a study in contrasts, of depth-soundings and highborn prayers. It’s a fantasy novel come to life, and in which kingdoms are built on foundations of magic just as they are undone by the same. In the looming shadow of its castle is where Parks follows more robust threads of melody in “Elsewhere,” an eerily distorted ballad of seeking and forgiveness that touches the horizon like a match to candlewick. So peaceful is its skewed vision of reality that the mechanisms of “In Pursuit” come as something of a surprise. In them is a whiff of philosophy that lingers over interlocking hands, the left’s rising bass lines bolstering the right’s gossamer speech. “Squirrels” and “Branchings” are, respectively, more whimsical and poetic, while “Homestead” favors the grays and browns of an Andrew Wyeth painting, its nautilus resting beneath a billowing curtain and chambered by the will to be heard.
This is one of those quintessential ECM albums that would not have existed without the label’s tireless archive on which to build, for one will catch hints of mainstays Ketil Bjørnstad (“River Ways”) and Arvo Pärt (“A Curious Bloom”) in addition to the ones already mentioned. By expanding minds on either side of the genre fence, it bespeaks the joy of creation for any who will take it—a gift without wrapping but the embrace of a welcoming ear.
Stefano Battaglia piano Salvator Maiore bass Roberto Dani drums
Recorded April 2012, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
When Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities, “And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music,” one might finish: that music comes from the pen of Stefano Battaglia. Following 2011’s The River of Anyder, it was difficult to imagine that the Italian pianist’s trio with bassist Salvator Maiore and drummer Roberto Dani could ever yield a more delicate creation, but with Songways the band has done just that. It is one of the most sensitive jazz experiences available on ECM, rivaling even Tord Gustavsen’s inward glances in scope. Much of that scope has to do with Battaglia, who imbues his compositions with a characteristic wealth of literary allusions.
The album’s title track, in fact, pays homage to the same Calvino fable, and like it tells stories from different perspectives, only to realize that the language and the environments it describes are one and the same. Groovy shadings make it no less contemplative, and Maiore’s archaeological bassing assures that every melodic artifact is polished and museum ready. Maiore, in fact, glows noticeably throughout the album’s dreamiest passages, as those taken through the capital of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput in “Mildendo Wide Song” or the twisted streets of Alfred Kubin’s “Perla.” As much a listener as a speaker, his erosions are so subtle that before you know it a river flows before you.
Battaglia, for his part, stands out in the philosophical (“Armonia,” inspired by Charles Fourier) and the surreal (“Monte Analogo,” from the book by Renée Daumal). Weaving through frames and brushes, he mines every artistic impulse until minerals have been exhausted. With increasing fervor, he paves avenues of abstract impressions. Yet the most rewarding gift of Songways is Dani. Whether brushing through Homer’s Odyssey in “Ismaro” in the wake of Battaglia’s footfalls, evoking the clock of Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional town “Vondervotteimittis” (hats off to engineer Stefano Amerio here for his miking of Dani’s cymbals), or transitioning from hands to sticks in “Babel Hymn,” his feel for tuning is ever on point.
Not only is this a brilliant album and the trio’s most thoughtful work to date; it is an experience that is sure to grow with you. This is jazz as alchemy, turning not lead into gold but gold into song.
Louis Sclavis bass clarinet, clarinet Benjamin Moussay piano, Fender Rhodes, keyboards Gilles Coronado electric guitar
Recorded September 2011, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production
Clarinetist-composer Louis Sclavis continues his journey of self-reinvention on Sources, in trio with keyboardist Benjamin Moussay and guitarist Gilles Coronado. In the album’s press release, Sclavis notes its singularity in his personal oeuvre: “It doesn’t resemble anything else, it’s really music conceived for this group and which couldn’t exist until we played it.” With the exception of the final track, an exploratory groove by Coronado entitled “Sous influences,” the album is comprised of Sclavis originals. While shades of his characteristic edges are detectable, there is indeed something fresh about the textures of what’s being put together there.
The combination of instruments may seem afield of anything else that ECM has produced. And yet, listening to “Près d’Hagondange” and “Dresseur de nuages,” I can’t help but think of Anouar Brahem’s trio work with Jean-Louis Matinier and Françoir Couturier. Despite a marked difference in style, there is affinity of temperament. The spiraling precision of through-composed passages between clarinet and piano gives way to a muscular sort of improvisation that maintains unusual economy of spirit through virtuosity, by which the musicians don’t so much show off as revel in the possibilities of their synergy. The second tune spotlights Moussay on Fender Rhodes, droning beneath Coronado’s circuitry in a postmodern rewiring.
Yet whatever the context, nothing can disguise the sonorous abandon of Sclavis’s bass clarinet, which tears through “La Disparition” as wildly as it beautifies “A Road To Karaganda” with gentler, modal arcs over Moussay’s deeper cartographies (the pianist also excels in “A Migrant’s Day,” for which he toggles between airborne to landlocked movement). Sclavis further enhances the microscopic electronic beat of the title track and evokes river’s flow in “Along The Niger” in a flurry of brushstrokes.
If Sources were a train, it would be balancing on one set of wheels, nearly toppling over but hugging the track at every turn. The trio fuels itself with the sustenance of invention, and with it puffs steam and song without looking back. This is the spiritual successor of Sclavis at his most abstract, a mind shed of its need for fixed identity and all the freer for it.
Anouar Brahem oud François Couturier piano Klaus Gesing bass clarinet, soprano saxophone Björn Meyer bass Orchestra della Svizzera italiana Pietro Mianiti conductor
Recorded May 2014, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineers: Stefano Amerio and Michael Rast (RSI)
Mixed in Lugano August 2014 by Manfred Eicher, Anouar Brahem, Stefano Amerio, and Michael Rast (RSI)
Executive producer RSI: Alissa Pedotti-Nembrini
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Following a six-year silence, master oudist Anouar Brahem returns to ECM Records with his most personal, yet somehow selfless, project yet. During the revolution that gripped his native Tunisia at the turn of 2011, Brahem experienced a creative drought and spent the following years gathering enough water to nourish the seeds that would become Souvenance. The title means “remembrance,” but the music looks resolutely forward, drinking in uncertainty as if it were the only sustenance visible from atop the rubble of uprising. Though Brahem claims no direct correlation to these events, their echoes remain, needing to be heard.
Souvenance brings together a new assemblage for Brahem, who situates his rosette within a quartet completed by François Couturier on piano, Klaus Gesing on bass clarinet and soprano saxophone, and Björn Meyer (formerly of Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin) on electric bass. One further layer finds realization in the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, under the empathic direction of Pietro Mianiti. Given the size of this gathering on paper, one might expect what the record’s press release describes: “The strings have a glowing transparency and fragility in these pieces, often providing shimmering texture against which the contributions of the quartet members—and, above all, Anouar Brahem’s unique oud-playing—stand out in bold relief.” But this is precisely what you won’t get. The strings are anything but fragile. They bind the very strength of resolve that brought Tunisians through civil unrest with spirits intact. As for Brahem’s oud, it is one of many elements feeding a uniform sound and therefore more content to recede than stand out. This is what gives the album its glowing transparency. Its virtuosity is to be found not in relief but in restraint, atmospheric integrity, and melodic truth. Here is none of the youthful exuberance of 1991’s Barzakh (his ECM debut) but something more like the reflective countenance that shades Brahem’s 2006 trio effort Le Voyage de Sahar. This project shows him at the height of maturity.
Despite boasting an 11-part suite spanning 90 minutes over two discs, Souvenance makes no pretensions of capturing an era or politic. The listener is invited neither to grieve nor to celebrate, but to contemplate what causes any strand of the human loom to snap. This would seem to be the message behind retrospective titles such as “Improbable day,” “Deliverance,” and “Like a dream.”
Couturier runs threads through them, but does so not to anchor but to reveal an underlying elasticity. With a gradualness than can only be described as pathos, the strings expel their breath to yield the organic oud. Within this collective snaps the large rubber band of Meyer’s bass, which goads the ensemble into acts of surprising lucidity and shines like the sun to Brahem’s moon. Between these signposts stretch the unanswered questions of an “Ashen sky” and “January.” Both would seem to reference the album’s cover photograph (taken on the streets of Tunis by Nacer Talel on January 18, 2011) and its pluming curtain of smoke.
Melodies are the lifeblood of Souvenance, and nowhere more so than in the title track, of which the modal pianism barely hints at sea changes in the air. As the program’s thematic heart, it percolates even more deeply than the rich surroundings of “Tunis at dawn” or “Youssef’s song.” In the latter, Brahem paints aftermath from a distance—a city in flames which barely appears to move and betrays nothing of the violations committed in its walls. Here and there, as the music flows toward closure, a bass line or reed motif will intertwine with some other branch of the tree. Homogeneity prevails, reaching cohesion in “Nouvelle vague,” a pulsing tune reprised from 1995’s Khomsa and arranged here for strings by Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits.
Do we fight for a world drunk at the wheel or do we jump from the vehicle before it drives off a bridge? This seems to be the conundrum faced by victims of injurious political agendas around the globe. With so much disgrace to (mis)understand, it’s all we can do not to separate ourselves from it. Bound as we are to fundament by stem and stalk yet reaching for firmament by leaf and petal, the test before us is whether or not to accept these things as a part of the human fabric, to remain standing even when all that we know is uprooted. Brahem, I dare say, shows us one possible path toward balance: the plectrum as fulcrum. In less uncertain terms, music is the answer to difference because its questions are greater than all of us put together. Sometimes “world music” exists in its own bubble, funneling cross-cultural influences to enliven self-awareness. Not so with Souvenance, which looks within to understand what transpires without. It’s not a statement, a manifesto, or a critique. It is pacifism at its utmost.
(See this review as it originally appeared in RootsWorld online magazine here.)
Keith Jarrett piano Charlie Haden double bass
Recording Producer: Keith Jarrett
Recorded March 2007 at Cavelight Studio
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Mastering at MSM Studios by Manfred Eicher and Christoph Stickel
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher
Seeing as this was to be Charlie Haden’s final record, one could easy read mournful prophecy into Last Dance. To be sure, its poignancy is as heavy as the burden of the bassist’s loss. To do so, however, risks obscuring the fact that the music under its title stretches seams by virtue of an abundance of life. Born of the same sessions as Jasmine, the lovingly interpreted standards of Last Dance again find Haden in the company of pianist Keith Jarrett, who once characterized this rare partner as a musician who thinks through whatever melody comes his way.
From the first few steps of “My Old Flame,” it’s clear these two men walk not together but along complementary paths, their shadows interlocking at any point along the trajectory of a tune. And by this forlorn song’s guiding hand, held above the starving ear like that of a Reiki master, an inner heat comes through. There is an album’s worth of feeling in this opener alone, and its flame is sustained in all that follows. It sets a proportional pace of love and loss that echoes throughout “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and “It Might As Well Be Spring.” That latter brings an especially joyful yet contemplative tone to the emerging image.
Lest we fall into a homogeneous meditation, the duo adds one part spice for every two of sugar. Be they navigating the rhythmic changeups of “Dance Of The Infidels” or leaping through the sprinklers of “Everything Happens To Me,” Haden and Jarrett sand down every jagged edge they encounter. True to the title of “My Ship,” they do not soar so much as sail, opening canvas to wind and mapping its lead. Their grandest voyage is an integral take on “’Round Midnight.” In addition to Jarrett’s oceanic foundation, it boasts a superbly architected solo from Haden, who builds a spire of song, robust as a centuries-old tree at the bottom yet thin as a whisper up top.
Alternate takes of “Where Can I Go Without You” and “Goodbye” carry over from Jasmine with even grander intimacy. Despite the bittersweet core of both, they feel like new beginnings. Each is a door of appreciation opened in the listener, from which pours memories of Haden’s legacy, thus making room for new ones to come. The musicians are achingly present, even as they transcend minds toward lyrical enlightenment. They flip through the Great American Songbook not as one might a newspaper, but resolutely and sincerely, as if it were scripture.
Given the lengths of these tunes (averaging about nine minutes each), I like to think that Haden and Jarrett might have spun any of them into a lifetime of improvisation. And perhaps, in a way, they already have. They play off each other so artfully before trading a single solo that solos begin to feel more like roots than departures. No matter how virtuosic their skills, the melody remains forever paramount. This album is like one massive song that will continue to evolve even after those who left its traces have improvised their way into another plane of existence entirely. And while Last Dance may be called cinematic, it differs from cinema in one key aspect: where cinema so often concerns itself with fictional characters, here the subjects are anything but. They are so real, it almost hurts to witness their conversation.
If Jarrett is the body, Haden is the soul.
(To hear samples of Last Dance, watch the video above or click here.)
Giovanni Guidi piano Thomas Morgan double bass João Lobo drums
Recorded December 2011, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Producer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi was not yet 30 when he recorded City of Broken Dreams, his ECM leader debut. Not only is it a trio album of crisp technical edges; it also welcomes to the fold an artist coming into his own as a composer. Fully schooled on Enrico Rava’s Tribe, he joins bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer João Lobo for a set of itinerant balladry.
The title track and its variation begin and end the album’s journey. Snaking contours therein describe passage from gentle introduction to long goodnight. Like the outer frame, the inner picture is one of gentle spells and molecular grooves. From the lyrical and emotionally honest “Leonie,” one might think this was a trio decades in the making. The musicians’ democratic finger-painting renders speed a non-variable on the path of expression, working toward a unity not heard on the label since the Tord Gustavsen Trio made its own debut with 2003’s Changing Places.
Still, one can’t help but squint into individual floodlights breaking through the haze. Morgan stands firmly the center of this album. His contributions alone make the album a must-have for fans of the instrument and/or its player. He is just as comfortable feeling his way through the geometric interplay of “No Other Possibility” as he is wavering like a reflection behind the sweeping pianism of “The Way Some People Live.” Lobo, for his part, is a drummer of scope. On “Just One More Time” he swings in the way that Paul Motian did before him—that is, with a meticulous stagger. His penchant for subtlety on the cymbals is thusly noted, evoking a cautious stroll through “The Forbidden Zone” and revealing images in the afterglow of “Late Blue” as if it were a scratchboard. Not to be overpowered, Guidi dialogues with his bandmates in “The Impossible Divorce” with a synergy of wing and wind and waxes poetic on the nature of waves in “Ocean View.” He is one possessed of an explorer’s intuition and, like the album as a whole, is far more interested what lies beneath the rubble than what that rubble once signified.
(To hear samples of City of Broken Dreams, click here.)
Stephan Micus Bavarian zither, dilruba, chitrali sitar, sattar, 14-string guitar, nay, voice
Recorded 2009-2012 at MCM Studios
An ECM Production
Panagia may be heard as the divine counterpart to Stephan Micus’s earthly album Athos of two decades before, and revisits the Greek peninsula that inspired its predecessor. As with all Micus projects, the focus here is crystalline and spiritual in a way that shuns any specific label or dogma. That being said, one can surely feel the personal histories that go into the many instruments with which he births his universal sounds, their ties to places rendered frozen by time. Micus’s magic—his rite, if you will—is to blend those variant histories into a singularity that few world travelers have ever translated so nakedly into the language of music.
Micus demonstrates this personal ethos in a brief album statement: “Throughout the world people have put their trust in a female goddess. In Greece she is called Panagia,” thus invoking an all-encompassing goddess even as he locates her within a particular faith. According to Evy Johanne Håland in her book Rituals of Death and Dying in Modern and Ancient Greece, Greek orthodoxy calls her Ē Prōtē (The First) and places her at the pinnacle of sainthood. Hence the seventh-century Byzantine prayers to Panagia of which Micus sings his verses, and in which Panagia is called, among other things, “Virgin Mary,” “blissful swallow,” “radiant cloud,” and, in Christ-like fashion, “the joy of the distressed, the guide of the blind and the refuge of orphans.” Where normally Micus falls into the histrionics of his own phonetic language, here a certain thematic vividness of worship lends his singing fresh anchorage.
Through its 11-part traversal, the album shuffles vocal tracks into instrumentals. The former are songs of praise, as indicated by their liturgical titles, while the latter are analogic poems in and of themselves. “I Praise You, Unfading Rose” and “I Praise You, Cloud of Light” open and close the circle with Micus accompanying himself on the Bavarian zither. The zither’s sparkle, in combination with the words, draws flesh from vibrational frequencies. It is as if the world were cradled in a giant hammock and swung from soul to soul like a pendulum of fate, leaving the solitary voice to twist like knots of meditation where tether meets tree. “I Praise You, Shelter of the World” is also bifurcated, only now we encounter 10 voices accompanied by Chinese gongs in a tangle of vapor and vine. In “I Praise You, Sweet-Smelling Cypress,” Micus adds to that number of voices his custom-built 14-string guitar, 8 dilruba (a bowed Indian instrument similar to the sarangi and prominently featured in Desert Poems), 3 sattar (Uyghur violin), and 5 Egyptian nay flutes for a thoroughly spectral palette. Two further tracks—“I Praise You, Lady of Passion” and “I Praise You, Sacred Mother”—feature 22 voices and 20 voices, respectively. Both are deeply hymnal.
The rebec-like sonority of 3 sattar in “You are like Fragrant Incense” (3 sattar) adds new timbres to Micus’s sound-world. With only their wordlessness to reckon with, the listener can feel their shape in a performance that travels like a pheromone: just below the radar of perception yet overflowing with connectivity. Whether doubled and joined by 2 Chitrali sitar in “You are Full of Grace” or with one sitar and 6 dilruba in “You are the Life-Giving Rain,” their topographical consistency attends to every leaf and branch and reveals the love necessary for self-enclosure. In a different stroke, both “You are the Treasure of Life” and “You are a Shining Spring” engage the same instrumentation of Tibetan chimes, Burmese temple bells, Zanskari horsebells, and 2 dilruba. The contrast between bell dust and dilruba soil mirrors that between sleeping and waking.
If pressed for a comparison, I would say that Panagia resembles Japanese classical gagaku in its arrangement and color, even if it is devoid of gagaku’s exclusivity. Rather, it makes of this big blue ball a royal court where we live not as servants but as purveyors of destiny. Its play of light on reflective surfaces makes it one of the best-recorded albums in the Micus catalogue. It is the meta-statement of a meta-statement, an expression of Gaia through cycles of human thought.
For those of you wondering where I’ve gone, and especially those who so kindly inquired, I just want to assure you that I’ve officially returned to my labors of reviewing love. As longtime readers will know, by day I’m pursuing a Ph.D. in Japanese Literature at Cornell University, and in that guise I’ve spent the better part of two months working on a rigorous and possibly career-defining fellowship application to conduct dissertational research in Japan. Now that said application is finished and has been submitted, I can return both to my academic and musical ramblings with renewed vigor. Onward I go.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 