Folk

Steve Tibbetts: Close (ECM 2858)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Tibbetts
Close

Steve Tibbetts guitar, percussion, piano
Marc Anderson percussion, gongs, handpan, loops
JT Bates drums
Recorded 2021-2024 in St. Paul by Steve Tibbetts
Drums recorded at 8vb Studio, Minneapolis by JT Bates
Mastered by Greg Reierson at Rare Form Mastering
Cover photo: Joel and Norris Tibbetts
An ECM Production
Release date: October 24, 2025

“Music is a twilight language.
The job is to translate some shadow into sound.”
–Steve Tibbetts

On his 11th album for ECM, guitarist Steve Tibbetts returns with his ever-present ally, percussionist Marc Anderson, joined by drummer JT Bates for a session of immense intimacy. If long-standing classics like Exploded View and Big Map Idea have attuned your ears in a certain direction, you can safely put those expectations aside. This time around, Tibbetts offers us imploded views and small map ideas. And while these are meticulously yet organically crafted as per usual, to appreciate their full potential requires meditation, repeat listenings, and an openness to disconnecting oneself from the FOMO of our digital lives in service of something far more subliminal and enduring.

All the more appropriate, then, that the album should take its first steps with “We Begin,” wherein a deep and sinuous sound stretches from horizon to horizon. Like many of the pieces here, it unfolds in multiple numbered parts, each embodying an interlocking experience that builds on the last. In Part 2, for example, the introduction of hand drumming gives traction and earthiness to the proceedings, even as Tibbetts morphs from one register to the next, swapping terrains with the ease of a fox changing the color of its fur without even thinking. The seasons are his compass, trudging through the underbrush as winter approaches. The delicate patter of canine footsteps is audible now and then, marking the forest floor with rhythms older than all of us put together.

In “Away,” another tripartite wonder, hints of distant thunder begin to encroach on our audible view. Without an umbrella, Tibbetts constructs one out of the materials at hand: his strings provide the metal spines, the percussion the webbing between them, and the melodies themselves the rod and handle where they meet. And even though the rain never comes, that’s okay. The beauty was in the anticipation of the downpour.

Not all is ferns and fronds, as “Remember” offers some grittier textures, recalling the solo work of Andy Hawkins. What’s fascinating here is how the title can be read as a metaphor for listening: both require a certain sensitivity to sounds and movements beyond one’s control. There is a sense of flow that exists just outside of time, especially in the piano Tibbetts adds to Part 2, lending an even more nostalgic tinge to the whole.

“Somewhere,” “Anywhere,” and “Everywhere” are something of a triptych in their own right. Consisting mostly of short intakes of breath, they cradle within them the slowest of burns in Part 3 of “Somewhere.” (It’s also a literal burn, as the tubes in Tibbetts’s amp catch fire at the 4’06” mark—listen for their satisfying decay!) Beyond that, one encounters hints of whale song, death knells, and other dark turns, all finding their final rest in “We End.” It’s a flower without a vase, gifted instead to the water’s surface.

Throughout this mellifluous journey, we are guided by two distinct voices. One is the 12-string, which Tibbetts strings in double courses rather than the standard octaves; the other, his acoustic and electric six-strings, on which he drops the low A and E down to G and C, respectively. “There’s always a bass drone available,” he notes of the effect. “That tends to keep all the tunes in the same key. I’m comfortable with that, having spent some time around gamelan ensembles, Tibetan longhorns, court music from Java, Hardangar fiddle from Norway. Most of the world’s music stays in one key or another.” True, and all the more reason to appreciate the yearning, keening quality of his touch. Like the sitar, so much happens after contact has been made.

This is by far the most delicate of Tibbetts’s albums, but for that reason, it speaks more directly to the heart. There is something uniquely tensile here such as only he can articulate. He is a master of suspensions: even in silence, one feels the slack in his gut. The cumulative effect borders on an autonomous sensory meridian response, where the creaking of strings and frets makes the very spine of the universe tingle. A shooting star in slow motion, it possesses time-lapse qualities. And just when you think Tibbetts will lift off and leave you behind, he touches down back on the soil and ensures your safe travels.

Alice Zawadzki/Fred Thomas/Misha Mullov-Abbado: Za Górami (ECM 2810)

| Tyran Grillo

Alice Zawadzki
Fred Thomas
Misha Mullov-Abbado
Za Górami

Alice Zawadzki voice, violin
Fred Thomas piano, vielle, drums
Misha Mullov-Abbado double bass
Recorded June 2023 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover painting: Emmanuel Barcilon
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 13, 2024

Collected on our travels and taught to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Gathered from Argentina, France, Venezuela, Poland, and the deep well of Sephardic culture, these folk tales speak to the moon, the mountains, the rain, the madness of humans, and the prophecies of birds.

The above is more than a collective artist statement from Alice Zawadzki (voice, violin), Fred Thomas (piano, vielle, drums), and Misha Mullov-Abbado (double bass). It’s also an example of how traditions, regardless of geographical distance, are organs of a larger body. Said body is literal, not metaphorical, insofar as it connects all of humanity at the internal level (the blood), even when the external (the voice) seems so disparate. The album’s title, Za Górami, says the same. Although it translates to “Behind the Mountains,” it is the Polish idiomatic equivalent of “Once upon a time…,” less a prompting of place than of possibility—not unlike the selections gathered here.

Within the trio’s curation of material, there is a liberal sprinkling of Sephardic songs. And yet, while some of the most well-worn treasures of the repertoire, including “Los Bilbilikos” (The Nightingales) and the lullaby, “Nani Nani,” are to be expected, the tact of each arrangement is remarkable. Even when the latter builds to an almost rapturous conclusion, it never loses sight of slumber’s healing effect. Such restraint is only made possible by a receding musicianship that lets the verses speak for themselves. This is increasingly rare to hear in Ladino programs, which can feel over-arranged as early music ensembles seek to outdo one another, favoring the interpreters over the interpreted. Not so in the hands of Zawadzki, who pours vocal plaster into “Dezile A Mi Amor” (Tell My Love) and “Arvoles Lloran Por Lluvias” (The Trees Weep For Rain) as if they were footprints in a landscape to be disturbed as little as possible. The tone and shape she brings to even wordless improvisations constitute natural delineations of their source material.

In Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas” (Untie The Ribbons), we find a most suitable modern companion. Steeped in the composer’s characteristically cinematic qualities, it lends itself to broader strokes in an instrumental economy. Thomas’s pianism is a warm evening breeze that equalizes the ambient air of its chamber and the lovers breathing it in. Its denouement alongside Mullov-Abbado’s heartbeat weaves a veil of privacy before Zawadzki renders their ecstasy a poetic afterimage. Another kindred spirit awaits in “Tonada De Luna Llena” (Song Of The Full Moon) by Venezuelan singer Simón Díaz, which yields some of the most evocative descriptions:

I saw a black heron
Fighting with the river
That’s how your heart
Falls in love with mine

The moon, even when not explicitly mentioned, is a constant presence in these songs, shining on the maiden in “Je Suis Trop Jeunette” (I’m Too Young, after Nicolas Gombert) who dreams of being swept away from her family. Her internal conflict is only heightened by the prepared piano in the upper registers, which carries over into the title song by Zawadzki, after the Polish traditional about a girl who defies her mother and ends up dancing her life away. “Gentle Lady,” Thomas’s setting of James Joyce, is a folk song in and of itself, stepping out of time to unravel its literary knot with grace.

ECM listeners familiar with the label projects of Savina Yannatou, Arianna Savall, and Amina Alaoui will feel swathed in comfort here, even as they are caught up in the unique flow that only this trio can bring forth from the hillsides of their wanderings. How fortunate we are that their paths have aligned on this side of the mountains.

Danish String Quartet: Keel Road (ECM New Series 2785)

| Tyran Grillo

Danish String Quartet
Keel Road

Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen violin
Frederik Øland violin
Asbjørn Nørgaard viola
Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin violoncello
Recorded November 2022
The Village Recording Studio, Copenhagen
Engineer: Thomas Vang
Recording supervision: Guido Gorna
Mixed at Bavaria Musikstudios, München
by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, Guido Gorna, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: August 30, 2024

Folk music and its sensibilities have always been the Danish String Quartet’s guiding star, as they likely were for many of the composers whose works they champion. Over the years, they’ve amassed a collection born of their love for songs of the people, and at last, in Keel Road, we have an ECM New Series program dedicated to this facet of their creative spirit. Through a selection of tunes themed around the North Sea, touching not only Scandinavia but also the Faroe Islands and beyond to Ireland and England, and featuring additional instruments (including spinet, harmonium, bass, and clog fiddle, all played by the DSQ), we are treated to a cornucopia of colors and flavors.

“Mabel Kelly” by Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738) eases us into this sound-world with a simple fable rendered with deep reflection. Other melodies by the legendary Celtic harpist from County Meath trailmark the journey that follows. From the programmatic “Carolan’s Quarrel With The Landlady” (Terry Riley after a little too much Jameson, perhaps?) to “Planxty Kelly,” his penchant for emotionally attuned textures is only heightened in the present renderings, fitting snugly in the company of the English traditionals “Lovely Joan,” in which pizzicato intersections cast a net for dreams, and “As I Walked Out,” where delicacy and sharpness mesh harmoniously.

Denmark gets placed under the microscope of “Pericondine,” a dance that moves with tender force. Despite the clean, modern production, it conveys a raw quality before shifting into the joyful “Fair Isle Jig” by lead violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen. It’s one of a few such mashups, including an old archival recording of “En Sokamger Har Jeg Været” that presages Sørensen’s denouement thereof in “Once A Shoemaker.” Wordless vocals add to the cinematic tint of its imaginativeness. The pinnacle of this form, and of the album as a whole, is the triptych formed by “Marie Louise” (Danish traditional), “The Chat” (co-written by Sørensen and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin), and “Gale Warning” (Sørensen). Starting with mid-tempo urgency, it rides the rails through mountains in search of something lost before resolving into an oncoming storm.

Even with such gems as “Når Mitt Øye, Trett Av Møye,” in which a harmonium enhances the hymnal qualities of the DSQ’s haunting arrangement, one might hardly tell the past apart from the future as eras intermingle in the studio. A most welcome surprise in this regard is the tune “Stormpolskan” by Ale Carr, who joins on cittern alongside Nikolaj Busk on piano, thus bringing together one of my favorite folk ensembles, Dreamers’ Circus. How wonderful to see them under the ECM banner, doing what they do best.

Savina Yannatou: Watersong (ECM 2773)

| Tyran Grillo

Savina Yannatou
Watersong

Savina Yannatou voice
Lamia Bedioui voice
Primavera en Salonico
Kostas Vomvolos qanun, accordion
Harris Lambrakis nay
Kyriakos Gouventas violin
Yannis Alexandris oud
Michalis Siganidis double bass
Dine Doneff percussion, waterphone
Recorded March 2022 at Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Yiorgos Kariotis
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Woong Chul An
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 11, 2025

For her fifth ECM album, Greek singer Savina Yannatou returns with a collection of songs themed around water. Spanning the European continent and beyond, her sources draw from wells of uniquely situated cultures and traditions, where the elemental force that sustains us can be at once beatific and menacing. Along with her mainstay musicians, Primavera en Salonico, she is joined by Tunisian singer Lamia Bedioui, last heard alongside Yannatou on Terra Nostra, and whose Arabic inflections lend interlocking contrast to the Mediterranean flavors.

The soul of the set list is to be found in the Greek material, of which “The Song of Klidonas” brings that distinctive voice into frame, while violin and oud dot the sky with extra stars. Yannatou links these into a storyboard of constellations. Similar vibrations abound in “The Immortal Water,” which moves like a body in the throes of unrequited love, while “Kalanta of the Theophany” turns a solemn carol into a jazzy free-for-all. Yannatou and her band further skirt the edges of interpretation in “Perperouna,” which describes water as something prayed for to ensure a harvest for survival. A percussive backdrop lends uplift, violin and nay soaring as birds catching a tailwind.

While island hopping from Cyprus (“Ai Giorkis,” a hymn to Saint George) to Corsica (“O onda,” a paean to ocean waves and distant storms by G. P. Lanfranchi), we encounter a gallery of moods, times, and places, including “Sia maledetta l’acqua” (Cursed Be the Water), a playful 15th-century gem, plus two journeys farther north. In the Gaelic “An Ròn” (The Seal), the qanun plays the role of harp, filling the air with shades of green and blue. And in “Full Fathom Five,” Robert Johnson’s 17th-century setting of words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, percussionist Dine Doneff plays the waterphone for a haunting evocation of entropy. But nowhere is the beauty so deep as in “A los baños del amor” (At the Baths of Love). This anonymous ballad from 16th-century Spain configures water as a sign of loneliness, a space to drown one’s sorrows. It is also something of a sister to “Con qué la lavaré?” (With What Shall I Wash It?) by El Cançoner del Duc de Calabria (1526-1554), another astonishingly lyrical melody, held in the most delicate of frames. It expresses that same sense of solitude, but with a hint of resignation to fate. 

Bedioui’s contributions are worlds unto themselves, especially because of the bridges they build. “Naanaa Algenina” (Garden Mint), an Egyptian traditional from Aswan, finds a suitable partner in “Ivana” from North Macedonia. Where one opens in duet as a moonflower, the other turns mystical in its freer geographies. “Mawal” (To the Mourning Dove, I Said) sets the poetry of Aby Firas al-Hamdani (10th century) to music by Iraqi singer-songwriter Nazem al-Ghazali, meshing Bedioui’s spoken word with Yannatou’s improvisational underlayment, hand drums marking the unprimed canvas with their ink. Finally, “Alla Musau” (God of Moses), a Nubian song about baptizing infants in the Nile, is interwoven with the African American spiritual “Wade in the Water.” The result is unexpected and wondrous.

As always, Primavera en Salonico’s chameleonic abilities are as free as they are precise. Playing both an anticipatory and reflective role, the band unpacks as many vocal implications as possible without the aid of words. Of the same mind, they walk in unison, even as their speech draws lines between increasingly disparate tongues.

Elina Duni: A Time To Remember (ECM 2781)

| Tyran Grillo

Elina Duni
A Time To Remember

Elina Duni voice
Rob Luft guitar
Matthieu Michel flugelhorn
Fred Thomas piano, drums
Recorded July 2022 at Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Nicolas Masson
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 16, 2023

And I will face the sea
that will bathe the pebbles.
Caresses of water, wind and air.
And light. Immensity.

So begins A Time To Remember, the latest box of newly minted coins to be placed alongside the others that singer Elina Duni has contributed to the ECM treasury. The song, “Évasion” (Escape), with music by Duni and guitarist Rob Luft and lyrics by Belgian-Israeli poet Esther Granek, is a paean to the stripping of hearts and minds down to their barest elements. Admirers of 2020’s Lost Ships will find the band more cohesive than ever, four hedges whose shapes have expanded and intertwined into one larger formation. Multi-instrumentalist Fred Thomas contributes flowing pianism to the set’s opener, while Matthieu Michel adds a voice of his own through the flugelhorn, all of it cradling Duni’s journey from wave to wave, carrying eras of history compressed into every exhalation. On the next shore awaits “Hape Derën” (Open The Door), one of two Albanian traditionals on the program, the other being the enchanting “E Vogël” (Little One), in which Duni and Luft weave through the air as birds in flight. Thomas adds light drums and percussion to this scene of domestic comforts, while Duni’s voice is as delicate as rice paper, softening the glare of remembrance from beyond the pale. “Mora Testinë” (I Grabbed The Water Jar), a folksong from Kosovo, completes the ancestral triangle with whims of flirtation and potential romance, Luft’s guitar sailing crystalline waters, as Duni and Michel move forth in unison of theme and purpose.

Singer and guitarist are the primary creative forces behind the texts and composing, respectively. The title song is one of a quadriptych from their adoring collaboration. Recalling the great folkish ballads of the 1960s and 70s (I sense the fingerprints of Tim Buckley or even Dan Fogelberg), it finds collective purpose in its individualism, where the love one shares with another, soul to soul, stands as the only monument to a world where towers and altars and fallen into dust. Meanwhile, “Whispers Of Water” and  “Sunderland” offer dreamier energies, the latter nestled in more quotidian surroundings:

Cars and spaces
Concrete erases my state of mind
But somehow
The heart is on rewind

This is the core of their navigation, where a split between the flesh and the environments it inhabits functions as its own safety net. Even the wordless “Dawn” transpires as a meditation, the meaning of which is never in doubt.

A curated smattering of touchpoints rounds out the story arc. Charlie Haden’s “First Song” finds the musicians in the most fragile mode, letting the innocence of Abbey Lincoln’s heartfelt lyrics blossom without getting in the way of their fragrance. Even Luft’s fuzzy electric works beneath the voice rather than through it. The Stephen Sondheim classic “Send In The Clowns” stands out as a surreal addition. To hear something so mainstream takes us out of body. Like “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” in the opening of the Disney/Pixar film WALL-E, it’s almost as if the world for which it was created is gone. Instead, it exists on its own terms, haunting outer space with echoes of a planet left to die. “Mallëngjimi” (Nostalgia), with music/lyrics by Rashid Krasniqi, expresses a kindred longing for an Albania that no longer exists. Even the unison of flugelhorn and voice, expanded by pianistic harmonies, can only be a closed circle. The standard “I’ll Be Seeing You” is another step out of time. It’s as if the Great American Songbook were an unfinished sentence on the tip of the cosmic tongue. Accompanied only by acoustic guitar, Duni’s voice recedes, forever unrequited.

Just as light and shadow need each other to survive but never fully comingle, each song on A Time To Remember gives shape to the rest. Their unity is born in contrast, taking shape as one of my top ECM albums of the decade.

Sinikka Langeland: Wind And Sun (ECM 2776)

| Tyran Grillo

Sinikka Langeland
WInd And Sun

Sinikka Langeland vocals, kantele, Jew’s harp
Mathias Eick trumpet
Trygve Seim tenor and soprano saxophones
Mats Eilertsen double bass
Thomas Strønen drums
Recorded June 2022 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Martin Abrahamsen
Mixed at Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
by Sinikka Langeland, Guido Gorna, and Michael Hinreiner
Cover photo: Dag Alveng
Produced by Guido Gorna
Release date: September 15, 2023

It walks and walks
and all the dead are with us
the dead too walk and walk
in us
–Jon Fosse

Sinikka Langeland has given breath to lungs far beyond the inner sanctum of the body, both through her salt-of-the-earth singing and unmatched touch of the kantele. And while she is ever an unfettered soul, unafraid to cross physical and metaphysical borders, there’s something particularly special about the assembly of musicians on Wind And Sun. With trumpeter Mathias Eick, saxophonist Trygve Seim, bassist Mats Eilertsen, and drummer Thomas Strønen, she brings life to the poetry of Jon Fosse as if it were the most natural process in the world—and perhaps, for her, it is. 

“Row My Ocean” sets a mood of sound and spirit. Its image of pushing against the water to move forward is the band’s modus operandi. It takes the rhythm of the waves not as a challenge to overcome but as a guiding heartbeat. This underlying pulse continues in the title track, an understated yet no less powerful instrumental that shines its way into fantasy and, in a later sung version, reveals secrets of the sea with maternal urgency.

The feet of Langeland’s composing fit perfectly in the shoes of Fosse’s verses. Her fluid yet pointillistic approach to “It Walks And Walks” echoes the poem’s dark yet life-affirming slant. As the gravity of land replaces the freedom of the waves, we feel the weight in our legs and feet and stumble into “Boat in Darkness,” where solitude becomes a path to resolution. Meanwhile, “Hands That Held” snakes and wanders as if accustomed to the uncertainty of living in the moment, unfolding in the album’s most haunting melody. Even “A Child Who Exists” (co-written with Geirr Tveitt) suffers no loss of space in being accompanied only by Seim. Neither does “Wind Song,” in which Jew’s harp and kantele dance as their own light source in the night.

Langeland’s kantele playing seems to get more enchanting with every release, and in “When The Heart Is A Moon,” we hear just how masterfully delicate her contact can be. It sparkles without offending the eye and takes our ear by the hand. The band is also locked into a faithful unity with the listener. Even Eick’s rising solo, a bird in low flight, never loses sight of its shadow throughout “I Want To Listen To The Angels,” while Eilertsen’s arco streaks and Strønen’s brushes evoke a subtle blues in “A Window Tells” and “The Love,” respectively. Band unity is on full display in the triptych of “You Hear My Heart Come” / “These Inner Days” / “Let The Rain Breathe,” where a single note needs forcing. Like the journey as a whole, every twist and turn speaks freely from the heart in the fullness of knowing that the destination is already behind us.

Nils Økland/Sigbjørn Apeland: Glimmer (ECM 2762)

| Tyran Grillo

Nils Økland
Sigbjørn Apeland
Glimmer

Nils Økland Hardanger fiddle, violin
Sigbjørn Apeland harmonium
Recorded January and March 2021 at ABC Studio, Etne, Norway
Engineer: Kjetil Illand
Mixed January 2023 at Bavaria Tonstudio, Munich
by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Cover drawing: Lars Hertervig, Sailing Boat, 1858
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: June 16, 2023

Representing nearly three decades of collaboration and exploring a repertoire that spans the gamut from traditional to improvised music (if not one and the same), fiddler Nils Økland and harmonium player Sigbjørn Apeland present Glimmer. The program takes inspiration from their native Western Norway, where Apeland has spent years collecting folk songs preserved by local singers. The duo also includes originals inspired by Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose drawing graces the album’s cover.

Most of the tunes survive in the living archive of their homeland, starting with “Skynd deg, skynd deg,” the melody of which melts like ice in the first dawn of spring. In this and its successor, “Gråt ikke søte pike,” Økland’s bow is a root plucked from the ground. The fiddle pulses with life beneath it, strands of potential others sprouting from its central branch, while the harmonium is the sunlight giving it sustenance. After this is “Valevåg,” the first of only two by Apeland (the second being the harmonium-only pulse of “Myr”). Dedicated to Norway’s first atonal composer, Fartein Valen (1887-1952), it is a snaking and mysterious piece that evacuates every mold it creates. This serves as a surreal prelude to “O du min Immanuel,” in which moments of far-reaching breadth wield navigational instruments of great intimacy. Such vacillations are what make the album so compelling.

Much of Økland’s writing favors the brief and the introspectional. Whether in the crystalline beauty of the title track or the haunting, rounded tone of “Dempar,” he draws with a potent pen across thickly fibered paper. And in “Rullestadjuvet,” for which he shares credit with Apeland, he brings forth an understated drama. With so much evocation practically dripping from their palette, they render every contour in three dimensions.

Among the traditionals that flesh out this curation, highlights include “Hvor er det godt å lande” for its dreamy splendor, “Se solens skjønne lys og prakt” for its cinematic charge and magical harmonics, and “Nu solen går ned” for reaching farther than it seems two instruments can. All of these are hymns to something, somewhere.

This is one of those special combinations of instruments that belongs in the same category as Inventio or Ojos Negros, resulting in music that leaves its shadow behind as a reminder of where it has yet to roam.

Lucian Ban/Mat Maneri: Transylvanian Dance (ECM 2824)

| Tyran Grillo

Lucian Ban
Mat Maneri
Transylvanian Dance

Mat Maneri viola
Lucian Ban piano
Recorded live at CJT Hall in Timișoara, October 29, 2022
Recording engineer: Utu Pascu
Mixing: Steve Lake and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
at Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Cover photo: Romania farm scene, 1919 (courtesy Library of Congress, Washington)
Album produced by Steve Lake
Release date: August 30, 2024

Transylvanian Dance is the long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s Transylvanian Concert. The latter ECM debut of pianist Lucian Ban and violist Mat Maneri’s collaboration was a landmark showcasing the duo’s ability to immerse and blend in a partnership written in the stars. The present program, recorded live in October 2022 in the context of the Retracing Bartók project in Timișoara, is based entirely on songs and dances collected by Béla Bartók in Transylvania. And yet, the recapitulation of this music is more than a gesture of preservation; it’s an act of solidarity. If Ban and Maneri are archaeologists, they regard every artifact on its own terms. Rather than dust off the caked sediment, they appreciate it as a part of what the object has become.

In his liner notes for the album, Steve Lake invokes the “treasure-house,” a term used by Bartók and fellow composer Zoltán Kodáldy to describe the folksongs that may have gone lost without their efforts and one that feels duly appropriate to label the container built by these four hands. Drawing from his own experience growing up in Transylvania, Ban stains the wood with an ancestral quality, while Maneri carves adornments patterned after the imprints of far-reaching histories from within.

Open the door and take any interpretation stored a few steps beyond it, and you’re sure to find something to connect to. That being said, “Poor Is My Heart” is about as sparkling an introduction as one could hope for into this archive of still photographs come to life. To be welcomed into this space so freely is more than a privilege; it speaks to the human right of free expression against tyrannies of silence. Appropriately, the pianism is lithe yet strong, while the viola is a pliant voice that speaks of reeds and winds from bygone eras, its harmonics turning shafts of recollection into particles of real-time action. Like the title track later in the program, it keeps no secrets from us. However near or far the musicians feel, their balance of extroversion and introversion is superbly rendered. If Ban is the earth, then Maneri is the tiller of its collective memories. “Romanian Folk Dance” is another ripe harvest. Through disjointed yet natural movements, it breathes with an unsettled (but never unsettling) quality. The instruments circle each other, closing but never tightening the knot past the point of loosening.

What might seem to be a discerning focus on revelry is the oxygen for the darker flames of “Lover Mine Of Long Ago,” which treats its garments as layers of skin to be shed at will. Ban’s exploration of the piano’s inner strings, whether by plucking or muting, polishes a dowry of coins and other trinkets to be left behind with it. Meanwhile, “The Enchanted Stag” is a keening hymn in which bluesy accents bend to the will of the compass’s needle. Both “Harvest Moon Ballad” and “The Boyar’s Doina” turn the concept of the soul into a playing style. Wavering yet never faltering, each is a house creaking in the night, reminding us of the fragility of what we call home. Settling ever deeper into the ground, their candlelit windows beacons for wandering dreamers, they create a breezeway for the final song, “Make Me, Lord, Slim And Tall.” Not a single note feels wasted: percolating, germinating, and fragrant as a forest floor after the rain. With so much fertility, we can only wonder at the gifts it will yield with repeat listens.

Anders Jormin/Lena Willemark: Pasado en claro (ECM 2761)

| Tyran Grillo

Anders Jormin/Lena Willemark
Pasado en claro

Anders Jormin double bass
Lena Willemark vocals, violin, viola
Karin Nakagawa 25-string koto
Jon Fält drums, percussion
Recorded December 2021 at Studio Epidemin, Gothenburg
Engineer and coproducer: Johannes Lundberg
Cover photo: Fotini Potamia
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: January 20, 2023

Since breaking ground on 2004’s In Winds, In Light, bassist Anders Jormin and singer/violinist/violist Lena Willemark have charted old and new territories in an increasingly fertile partnership. Their collaboration reached the next stage of development when they welcomed Japanese koto player Karin Nakagawa into their midst on 2015’s Trees Of Light. To that milieu, they’ve added drummer Jon Fält, whose name will be familiar to Bobo Stenson Trio fans. Although Willemark’s roots in Swedish folk heritage and its preservation are at the core of what’s being articulated here, the improvisational packaging has been deepened. The settings touch down on the landing strips of many times and places, including poetry from ancient China and Japan, contemporary Scandinavia, Mexican luminary Octavio Paz (whose “Pasado en claro” gives us this album’s title), and Renaissance humanist Petrarch.

The latter’s Poem no. 164 from Canzoniere, the eponymous subject of “Petrarca,” flickers like a candle flame. It is one of many musical settings by Jormin, whose loose strata give his bandmates plenty of room to look for fossils and regard their shapes melodically. Long before that, “Mist of the River,” his take on Ouyang Xiu (1007-1072), opens with the gentlest shimmer of koto. The poem paints a picture of a fisherman whose cast is obscured by mist and storm, resolving into groovy textures. With the clarity of a statue, Willemark etches the scene one frame at a time until they mesh into a flowing whole. Brushed drums add jazzy touches: water and silver combined. “Glowworm” looks even further back to the 8th century. The tanka by Yamabe no Akahito, rendered here in an evocative Swedish translation, finds Willemark and Jormin’s instruments in a cloudy slumber while percussion and koto yield just enough light to see the contours of their dreams.

Most of Jormin’s tapestries are woven from more recent material. And yet, despite the brief appearance of artifice—as in Jörgen Lind’s “Blue Lamp,” which contrasts hospital buildings against a starkly natural scene—all the modern verses are steeped in an unbroken respect for the organic. This is especially true in “Kingdom of Coldness,” where the haikus of Tomas Tranströmer seep through liquid gongs and arco bass as Willemark’s voice draws maternal lines across Nakagawa’s constellations, and “Returning Wave,” where Anna Greta Wide’s words accumulate against the barrier of closed eyelids.

The remaining tracks consist of original songs by Willemark, who has her bow and throat on the pulse of something so genuinely folkloric that they seem as weathered by time as the rest. “The black sand bears your footprints / trampled by many, but seen by none,” she sings in “Ramona Elena,” forging a scene of heartache, loss, and sisterly love that demands motionless listening. “The Woman of the Long Ice” brings more of that briny sound through her fiddle as she laughs with joy at the power of music to run beneath even the most frozen waters. (This track is also a highlight for its freer playing.) Between the instrumental “Wedding Polska” and the leaping strains of “Angels,” the quartet never loses sight of its roots, which run deep and wide, sustaining forests older than us all.