ECM Releases

Krakatau: Matinale (ECM 1529)

| Tyran Grillo

Krakatau
Matinale

Raoul Björkenheim guitars, bass recorder, gong
Jone Takamäki tenor, alto, soprano and bass saxophones, krakaphone, reed flute, wooden flute, bell
Uffe Krokfors double-bass, percussion
Ippe Kätkä drums, gongs, percussion
Recorded November 1993 at Hardstudios, Winterthur
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Steve Lake

Krakatau is an ever-exciting fusion project from Finland that left two broad gasps on ECM. Matinale was the second, and remains the more politically astute of the pair. Guitarist Raoul Björkenheim is the main compositional force behind the album, and leads a quartet of hip multi-instrumentalists squared out by reedman Jone Takamäki, bassist Uffe Krokfors, and drummer Ippe Kätkä. The title track emerges from the gates with a blast of fresh energy in which Björkenheim and Takamäki dominate the left and right channels vying for the middle ground, which has been claimed as the rhythm section’s sole territory. Steve Lake’s deft production and Martin Wieland’s pointed mixing only enhance this plus sign, for the album is indeed all about the additions each musician brings to bear on this visceral studio date: (1) Björkenheim, a distorted and bubbling cauldron of emotional whiplash, (2) Kätkä, a persistent flavor one can’t quite brush out, (3) Krokfors, a counterweight to the constant threat of imbalance, (4) Takamäki, a smoothness that can be buttery yet also knows how to crack a wry smile now and then.

Three improv sessions follow this opening chunk. Krokfors’s bass hums like a sleeping whale through the roiling gong and windy shores of “Unseen Sea Scene,” dreaming of the Chinese gong and reeds of “Jai-Ping.” Björkenheim interrogates his lucrative solo here like some criminal aria, matching Takamäki’s incisions drop for drop until they are bled dry. “Rural,” on the other hand, is a bass-heavy piece that manages to be light on its feet, borne along by an entourage of low reeds.

After a mournful intro, “For Bernard Moore” blossoms into life through a frenetic bass and cymbals. It fast-forwards through that life with a lush sax solo, only to be retold by a tighter guitar line. Excellent stuff. Yet at twelve and a half minutes, the album’s meta-statement is “Sarajevo.” Björkenheim opens with something like a folk song before pressing onward into a viscous and sometimes morose landscape of ruin. This is a portrait in stark color of a body whose language is a bowed head. Sounding here like the vamp of a carnival organ slowed into frightening pathos, and there like a body struggling to be heard from under the rubble of a senseless act of destruction, it seeps into the bones like empathy. To keep us from falling too far, “Suhka” offers a dance of light on water by enacting the very song that has set it into motion. To finish, our fearless foursome slake a “Raging Thirst” with undeniable conviction.

Matinale reshuffles its own formula with every cut, and provides a window into Krakatau’s uniquely personal process. Don’t overlook it.

<< John Surman: A Biography Of The Rev. Absalom Dawe (ECM 1528)
>> Händel: Suites for Keyboard (ECM 1530 NS)

Jan Garbarek: Legend Of The Seven Dreams (ECM 1381)

| Tyran Grillo

 

 

Jan Garbarek
Legend Of The Seven Dreams

Jan Garbarek soprano and tenor saxophones, flute, percussion
Rainer Brüninghaus keyboards
Nana Vasconcelos percussion, voice
Eberhard Weber bass
Recorded July 1988 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Legend Of The Seven Dreams is hands down one of Garbarek’s finest. A fantastic album that welcomed listeners into one of the versatile saxophonist’s most captivating sonic continents, one mapped further on Visible World (a personal favorite), it digs deep into the soils of his native Norway and beyond and marks a leaning toward the soprano that has colored so much of his playing since. And with Rainer Brüninghaus on keyboards, Nana Vasconcelos on percussion (including some vocal details), and Eberhard Weber on bass as his fellow journeyers, who could ask for more?

Garbarek’s lines are as smooth as the jet stream in the folk tale that is “He Comes From The North.” The immediately recognizable berimbau of Vasconcelos lifts this piece to even greater heights of emotive power. An inauguration ceremony in sound, this blissful opener holds attention for every second of its fourteen-minute expanse. “Aichuri, The Song Man” is another cavern of dreams, where the plodding footsteps of history echo and an otherworldly synthesizer speaks with the voice of the future. Into this swirling milieu Garbarek adds his distinct flavors, divining every bone with a flesh made music. The wooden clicks of the “Tongue Of Secrets” impart flight to a solemn flute, whose only soul hides in the undergrowth of an undiscovered country somewhere far below (the flute also makes a wayfaring appearance in the solo “Its Name Is Secret Road”). “Brother Wind,” a classic in the Garbarek canon, makes an early appearance here. Like its namesake, its pure, inspiring craftwork flows in all directions. This and “Voy Cantando” feature a beautiful synth harpsichord as progenitor of Garbarek’s lilting themes. As might a river over eons, Weber carves not a few winding paths in “Send Word,” for which Garbarek is ever the reliable guide. The missing capstone to this pyramid is the two-part “Mirror Stone,” which drifts, not unlike the smoke of the album’s cover, from the fissure of a solitary pyre.

In terms of its electronics, the mythological potency of this date is a vast improvement on the integrative experiments of All Those Born With Wings. Here is a musician coming into his own, as he continues to do throughout his career, yet again.

<< Steve Tibbetts: Big Map Idea (ECM 1380)
>> Keith Jarrett: Personal Mountains (ECM 1382)

Steve Tibbetts: Big Map Idea (ECM 1380)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Tibbetts
Big Map Idea

Steve Tibbetts guitars, dobro, kalimba, pianolin, tapes
Marc Anderson percussion
Marcus Wise tabla
Michelle Kinney cello
Recorded 1987/88 in St. Paul, Minnesota
Engineer: Steve Tibbetts
Produced by Steve Tibbetts

With this release, Steve Tibbetts turned a new leaf in his cartographic imagination. The album’s title betrays its creator’s humility, acknowledging the incompleteness of any landscape, which is never more than a cultural possibility. We see this the moment that signature slack-jawed guitar and worldly percussion paint for us a big map indeed in “Black Mountain Side.” And what’s this? A Led Zeppelin tune, artfully arranged and wrapped in a sparkling bow as only Tibbetts can tie it. But even when he strays into the dripping caverns of “Black Year,” where flames have burnt out long ago yet still flicker with feeling, we are never lost, for there is always something familiar to hold on to. Tracks like this and “Big Idea” teeter at the edge of an all-out frenzy, but stay respectfully perched atop cold mountains, watching the plains with eagle eyes. Each hit of the steel drum forms a new cloud, rustling the foliage in “Wish” and hopping like a bird from branch to branch. The finger tapping and kalimba-infused connections of “Mile 234” make it one of the more masterful turns on this trip. Some of that same instrumental color bleeds into “100 Moons” before an acoustic/electric dance lays track in “Wait.” Sampled voices flow throughout “3 Letters,” turning like a diorama lit by strings, and finish as if living in reverse, turning light into dark, warm and sustained by a maternal hope.

If the majority of Tibbetts’s work is a chant, then Big Map Idea is a lullaby. It is a florid expression of its ancestors, using a relatively intimate palette, one where wings and earth are far closer to one another than logic would dictate.

<< Keith Jarrett: Dark Intervals (ECM 1379)
>> Jan Garbarek: Legend of The Seven Dreams (ECM 1381)

Keith Jarrett: Dark Intervals (ECM 1379)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Dark Intervals

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded April 11, 1987 at Suntory Hall, Tokyo
Engineer: Kimio Oikawa
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Keith Jarrett weaves a special kind of spell in his improvisations, one somehow connected to a greater humanity, for though the music and playing are ethereal, one is never mistaken that they are anything but earthly. Jarrett is not a mere vessel, but a creative force of flesh and bone whose fingers speak in ways we can only understand without words. This live recording from Tokyo’s Suntory Hall expands that flesh, and feels so intimate it might as well have grown away from others in the cave of his private studio.

In the roiling cascade of light and shadow that is “Opening,” there is much to ponder. At nearly 13 minutes, it is the set’s longest, and sweeps us away in an undercurrent of molten echoes. “Hymn” is a more resplendent foray into Jarrett’s emotional recesses, one that speaks as much to the future as it does to the past while embracing in its tender heart the impossibility of the present. Its light is always flecked with dust kicked up by the footsteps of a lost people whose only shelter is any that may be found. “Americana” breathes with a heaving gentility, one that soars even as it dreams on foot. “Entrance” walks with a gentle assurance onto the stage, trailing a monochromatic veil and finding solace in a skyward glance. “Parallels” is, ironically, the most skewed track on the album and yet also manages in its teetering journey to string a well-anchored tightrope between loss and resolve. “Fire Dance” is a spinning top of exaltation, a hand made of sparks stirring one’s emotional pot until it boils, while “Ritual Prayer” is proof positive of the lifetime’s worth of inspiration Jarrett must have absorbed from Gurdjieff. This piece is rich with spiritual beauty and is one of Jarrett’s most selfless exhalations ever recorded. “Recitative” is another gentle bob on the waters of introspection, a protracted fall into repentant pitch. There is forgiveness in this blindness, for only in the echo of a vibrating string can one feel the light of release.

<< Heinz Reber: MNAOMAI, MNOMAI (ECM 1378 NS)
>> Steve Tibbetts: Big Map Idea (ECM 1380)

Dino Saluzzi: Andina (ECM 1375)

| Tyran Grillo

Dino Saluzzi
Andina

Dino Saluzzi bandoneón, flute
Recorded May 1988 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Each title on Andina, Dino Saluzzi’s second solo album for ECM, describes a different facet of the bandoneón prodigy’s creative process. He is the forlorn sonic architect, using melody to construct a world of indelible impressions, and perhaps nowhere more so than in “Memories,” which in both concept and execution seems the culmination of his notecraft and the spirit on which it thrives. Saluzzi makes an organ of his instrument, suspending a new ornament from every echoed moment, each a forgiving step into a shaded past. And in that past we encounter a life in miniature. A lively “Dance” introduces us to the music’s silver screen, on which rich insights flicker like a trailer for all that follows. “Winter” leaves a chain of cautious footsteps imprinted on the blanketed landscape. The promise of a warm hearth quivers in a single lit window, a beacon in the snowdrift. We feel this domestic comfort in every key change, in every “Transmutation” that balances agitation with resignation. The overwhelming solitude then splits into the eerie “Tango Of Oblivion,” moving with light footwork across heavy sentiments into “Choral.” This slow hymn-like progression is the one of the album’s most endearing, sounding like an organ touched by the fingers of a lone Kapellmeister, whose only muse is the absence of light. In contrast, the chording of “Waltz For Verena” twirls joyfully like a gymnast’s ribbon. And if by the time the title piece unleashes its emotional reserves you aren’t fully immersed, then you may want to get an EKG.

Another quiet stunner from Saluzzi, Andina is lovingly recorded, allowing perfect separation between both sides of the bellows. His leading lines in the right hand move like ice skaters across the blackened surfaces of the left. And while an unaccompanied squeezebox recital may not sound like everyone’s idea of a good time, Saluzzi holds rapt attention through a constantly metamorphosing array of moods, melodies, and atmospheres. Nothing short of magical.

<< Eberhard Weber: Orchestra (ECM 1374)
>> Werner Bärtschi: Mozart/Scelsi/Pärt/Busoni/Bärtschi (ECM 1377 NS)

Markus Stockhausen: Cosi Lontano … Quasi Dentro (ECM 1371)

| Tyran Grillo

Markus Stockhausen
Cosi Lontano … Quasi Dentro

Markus Stockhausen trumpet, fluegelhorn, synthesizer
Gary Peacock bass
Fabrizio Ottaviucci piano
Zoro Babel drums
Recorded March 1988 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Trumpeter Markus Stockhausen follows, not leads, this haunting improvisation session with Gary Peacock on bass, Fabrizio Ottaviucci on piano, and Zoro Babel on drums. The colors are as rich as the names on the roster, and work their way through eight improvisatory spaces with varying degrees of clarity. “So Far,” for instance, begins like fingers groping along the wall of a pitch-dark room, awakening after an undisclosed period of unconsciousness. Like you, it doesn’t know where it is. You hear drums, cymbals, a bass, can feel the rattling of a piano in your ribcage. There is resolution only in that last morsel of starvation, where Peacock’s gentle scramble over a drone of horns in “Forward” bursts like a play of light and shadow while Babel plays 52 Pickup on the periphery. “Late” features a rare arco turn from Peacock, who scratches a treatise’s worth of indecipherable letters at the center of every galaxy Stockhausen traces around him. Yet the proceedings aren’t all slip and slide, for “Across Bridges” gives us a hefty dose of traction, as if throwing a final memory our way before capture. Bass and drums dance in a free conversation with Stockhausen, who lays down a refracted song “In Parallel.” This blossoming of after-midnight sentiments and avenues pales into “Breaking,” a concise staccato package unwrapped as if by a child at the base of a toppling Christmas tree. Babel sits out “Through,” another excursion into starlight, rising only upon the latter waves of “Almost Inside,” which over an inescapable hum rise and fall like eventide on the shoreline of a desolate island.

You’re not going to find your foot tapping to this one, but your mind will already know its rhythms before the first note graces your ears.

<< Arvo Pärt: Passio (ECM 1370 NS)
>> Alex Cline: The Lamp And The Star (ECM 1372)

Heiner Goebbels: Der Mann im Fahrstuhl/The Man In The Elevator (ECM 1369)

| Tyran Grillo

Heiner Goebbels
Der Mann im Fahrstuhl/The Man In The Elevator

Arto Lindsay voice, guitar
Ernst Stötzner voice
Don Cherry voice, trumpet, doussn’gouni
Fred Frith guitar, bass
Charles Hayward drums, metal
George Lewis trombone
Ned Rothenberg saxophones, bass clarinet
Heiner Goebbels piano, synthesizer, programming
Recorded March 1988, Sound On Sound Recording, New York
Engineer: Mike McMackin
Produced by Heiner Goebbels and Manfred Eicher

“Your home is a box. Your car is a box on wheels. You drive to work in it. You drive home in it. You sit in your home, staring into a box. It erodes your soul, while the box that is your body inevitably withers…then dies. Whereupon it is placed in the ultimate box, to slowly decompose”
–Arlington Steward in The Box

Heiner Goebbels continues his (man)made-in-heaven collaboration with Heiner Müller in this fascinating piece of hate mail to the modern condition. Drawing on talents as diverse as Arto Lindsay, Ned Rothenberg, George Lewis, Fred Frith, and Don Cherry, it begins as it ends: in a dance of doppelgangers. Lindsay carefully plots every step of this morbid ball with his delicate guitar. He is the everyman, the proverbial drone splashing his thoughts against the sphere of his labor, rattling like the many cages of transport that carry him through life’s many turns. Like his instrumental comrades, he is constructed by his attire, tuned to the plight of interaction. Lindsay’s omnipleasant diction luxuriates in every rounded r, a tempered steel to Rothenberg’s engaging reeds, the latter a guardian angel fluttering at our backs, constantly tapping the shoulder of those of us who cannot help but ignore the gesture, we in whom ignorance is a coping mechanism.

Lindsay introduces us to the Boss, Mr. Number One whom one never addresses directly. His is a name we must forget, for behind that visage of darkness lies the agitated voice of Ernst Stötzner, who seems to channel David Moss in a constant breakdown of communicative interest. Lindsay’s protagonist responds with a kneejerk expectoration, a James Brown-like cry rendered meaningless in a muzak-infested void. Two distinct voices tainting an urban desert, whose only oasis is circumscribed by the sweeping hands of a wristwatch.

This is a life written in indecipherable shorthand, a steno bound in human skin. A dripping, Peter Greenaway-like pillow book as résumé. A ball-peen hammer ticks away against the inside plane of a metallic skull, branded by the letterhead of a company whose product is never made clear. A desktop computer whines its woebegone tale. The elevator continues to glide along the shaft of our expectations, or lack thereof, smoothed along by the grist of mysteriously absent clerks and secretaries, every coworker a follicle in the dandruff-infested scalp of society.

A flapping of the lips, as if to proclaim, “I am here.” The batting of an eyelid, as if to deny the very same. Against the sparkling passage of data, one can only run in place. A voice over the PA. The boss tops himself, spilling his brilliance across the already untended battlefield of his planner. The populace ignorant, spawning the one serial number who refuses this lot. A warped record of Brazilian love songs melts in between floors, seeping into the sewer, which carries the muck of a single workday below the feet of protesters on the street. Their appeals blend into the signage that advertises their lives.

Intimations of a faraway people and their music laced with grasses of which one can only fantasize. The fume-infested club offers no solace, and only serves to hem the cloak of anonymity, which we can never seem to shrug off. The possibility of rising to the top of the bureaucratic food chain is as vain as hoping that a parachute might spring magically from one’s back the moment he jumps from the penthouse window like so many before. Still, at the end of the day, as the varicolored air burrows like a snake into one’s open shirt, a dream of love waves as one surrenders to a different sort of imprisonment, one in which bliss is real because it is self-selected. But this love belongs in another’s arms, those of the man you’ll never be, who sings as he lives: boisterously out of tune. Cherry’s trumpet cleans the slate before filling in the chrome grille of the last car you’ll ever see. A car whose license plate reads BOSS, and whose chassis was built on the predecessors into which your body will be absorbed in preparation for your replacement.

Such are the polyglot galleries Goebbels draws out of his distinct array of inceptions and spoken words. His is a scathing and evocative exploration of the urban landscape, but one that never smacks of moral self-righteousness. Rather, it involves itself in its surroundings, drawing red threads through death, the corporate environment, and noises of progress. Goebbels joins disparate elements to unite, at one moment pounding them together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that won’t quite fit, the next letting them speak to one another in agreement.

This is an altogether evocative work. Like any self-respecting postmodernists, its creators always seem to implicate themselves in the very destructions they describe. Which is perhaps why the elevator is the perfect metaphor: its verticality is counterintuitive to the horizontal passage of human traffic. In that 90-degreee intersection lies more than a geometrical relationship, but something of a defining moment, a physical decay that can be felt in the indeterminacies of music-making, in the fragility of song, and in the power of speech.

<< Paul Hillier: Proensa (ECM 1368 NS)
>> Arvo Pärt: Passio (ECM 1370 NS)

Masqualero: Aero (ECM 1367)

| Tyran Grillo

Masqualero
Aero

Arild Andersen bass
Jon Christensen drums
Tore Brunborg tenor and soprano saxophones
Nils Petter Molvær trumpet
Frode Alnæs guitar
Recorded November 1987 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Arild Andersen

Arild Andersen found one of his clearest avenues of expression with Masqualero, a group that brought him notably together with trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, saxophonist Tore Brunborg, and drummer Jon Christensen. On Aero, the group’s second album for ECM, he is joined also by Frode Alnæs, whose looming drones ebb and flow throughout the title opener, which seems to materialize out of nothing into a looming figure of delicate comportment and elegant mind. It is this figure whose footsteps Andersen articulates. In “Science” this figure shows us it can dance, fashioning a partner out of snatches of rain and cloud, autumn and snowdrift. The confidence of that stride is expressed in the superb dynamic contrasts of the band, only to be unraveled through Brunborg’s platonic soprano into a sonorous vulnerability. Despite his penchant for lush enigmas, Alnæs isn’t above flicking a brief allusion here to “Flight of the Bumblebee” from the end of his sonic cigarette. Andersen opens “Venise” alone before smoothing out its wrinkles through Christensen’s delicate shaker and gurgling snare. Molvær is beguiling here, all the more so for being backed by the ghostly draws of Alnæs’s electric. “Printer” busts out a decidedly fatter sound, marked in the shift to alto sax. Guitar lines scratch the earth with their steel-stringed nails, Andersen licking the background like a flame all the while. “Bålet” opens in a quiet electronic swamp that sounds more like something off of Jon Hassell’s Power Spot, which is to say it comes across as highly organic in spite of the technological enhancements. Alnæs floats some lanterns from the book of Rypdal on the icy stream that is “Return,” which is kept from freezing over by Andersen’s buoyancy, and resolves into an eddy of brass. We come at last to “Bee Gee.” Molvær’s muted wings balance Andersen’s deep twangs, threaded by a fragile shaker. The loveliness intensifies with Brunborg’s soprano and in the lilting crawl of the guitar, which carries us out in heavenly repose.

<< John Surman: Private City (ECM 1366)
>> Paul Hillier: Proensa (ECM 1368 NS)

Rabih Abou-Khalil: Nafas (ECM 1359)

| Tyran Grillo

Rabih Abou-Khalil
Nafas

Rabih Abou-Khalil oud
Selim Kusur nay, voice
Glen Velez frame drums
Setrak Sarkissian darabukka
Recorded February 1988 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Nafas is Lebanese oud master and composer Rabih Abou-Khalil’s only ECM album, and it is a thing of beauty. Blending Arabic elements with flowing execution, its musicians are not so much in dialogue as they are in communion, sharing the same path to light and immediacy.

Nafas reads like life itself, beginning and ending with Glen Velez on frame drums. Between “Awakening” and “Nadi,” he carves an arousing circle of worldly desires rendered transparent through reflection. It is he who draws us upright into the morning sun, in which Selim Kusur’s gentle nay shines upon our faces through “Window.” Outside, we see that the two have joined forces, a pair of journeyers walking together, planting a tree with every step, so that when the oud blossoms into the present, it cannot help but paint leaves on every curling branch of the past.

This music never flaunts the virtuosity required to produce it, but rather sheds it like a skin to reveal a deeper understanding of its own craft. Take, for instance, “Gaval Dance,” which moves like a cycle within a cycle—from birth into death and back into birth. The nay revives itself in “The Return I.” Wavering, windblown, and forever flying, it is like the first fray of an unraveling, pulling us into the secondary orbit of “The Return II,” where the sounds of nature are the truest pedagogy. Setrak Sarkissian enchants here on the darabukka (clay drum). After Kusur’s sepia-tinted vocals bring the title of “Incantation” into fruition, we get some of the liveliest sounds on the record, which is all the more transportive for its swirling energies. In “Waiting,” we find ourselves drenched in yearning. The oud traces fears and confidences, working like an awl to let in the golden love of “Amal Hayati.” This hope brings us higher on the wings of the title composition, a brief passage into a cloudy embrace.

Albums like this should not be seen as mere token nods in the ECM canon, but rather as selfless parts of a larger flowing whole. Nafas is simply gorgeous music-making that is as intimate as it is all-encompassing, opening like a sky into the heart of something divine.

<< Stephan Micus: Twilight Fields (ECM 1358)
>> Keith Jarrett Trio: Still Live (ECM 1360/61)