Jazz

Alfred Harth: This Earth! (ECM 1264)

| Tyran Grillo

Alfred Harth
This Earth!

Alfred Harth tenor, alto and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet
Paul Bley piano
Trilok Gurtu percussion
Maggie Nicols voice
Barre Phillips bass
Recorded May 1983, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

This Earth! represents Alfred Harth’s second ECM appearance, supporting a stellar cast of musicians that includes Barre Phillips on bass, Paul Bley at the keys, Trilok Gurtu on percussion, and the inimitable Maggie Nicols doing what she loves. The words are by Vicky Scrivener, which could easily be a pen name for Nicols herself—such is the immediacy with which the words seem to pour from her lungs.

“Female Is The Sun” is the album’s anthem. Structured around a counterpoint of bass clarinet and pianistic asides, its skeleton comes to life through Nicols’s animations. Each verse hoists us deeper into the sky, until we begin to feel the heat of that “old gold woman” who oversees our every waking moment:

The earth’s hot eye reels
fenced
and groans before
vestal temperament

The piano and bass in “Relation To Light, Colour and Feeling” are like two adjacent houses. Between them, a sagging clothesline, from which wordless songs, doubled by sax, hang in the breeze of a balmy afternoon. Words await us at the end, each a folded cloth, a swaying branch, a chirping bird.

Luxurious mezzotints and shades
glowing wash of tones

A percussive introduction opens us to the fabulous spoken word performance of “Studying Walk, A Landscape.” Nicols carries us along with her unpretentious tugs, inscribing the scenery with tightened, almost saxophonic squeals. There is an urban whimsy to be found here, refreshing but also tinged by world-weary bitterness. Phillips also has a lovely solo in this whimsical track with heft and shape.

A wish, relief from a circle

In “Body & Mentation,” piano and bowed bass engage Harth’s tenor with bright energy. Gurtu spreads his palms wide through these aural veins, Harth tracing with a palmist’s care. Their interplay vacillates: a few steps from Gurtu, a few expulsions from Harth. Each move forward italicizes the piece’s sentence structure, closing on an elegiac statement from Bley.

Love’s tug –
our barge;
sweet clamorous tidings
on the unique
journey backwards
to progression.

“Energy: Blood/Air” reveals the album’s most porous textures. Over a tightly knit ostinato, Harth breathes life into Nicols, who skims a poem’s surface before slipping into protracted improvisation. Bley floats a light solo over our heads, gathered up amid a handful of bass.

Today she sits
in the angled skies…
lowering lids
at the blushing
earth.

The “Three Acts Of Recognition” that follow slip a contemplative card into this highly charged deck as Harth’s tender yet robust tenor ladles sound into our silence. Some well-chosen reverb lends a throated quality his song. Overtones mingle as piano chords lay down new ground for every self-aware step. A pause. Bley reaches into his instrument, plucking and strumming strings directly, while Harth spins molecules in the air. Another pause. We return to the keyboard, flowing through to the end.

Between the clean
and tender sheets
we’ll hear us out.

“Come Oekotopia” crackles in rain sticks and cymbals, drawing bass from the soil. Harth improvises over Phillips’s nimble strumming. His long-held note midway through is one of the album’s highlights. Percussive bells diffuse this energy. Nicols makes a phonemic cameo at the end.

The mind streams
to pulse
relinquishing

Her subsequent recitative in “Waves Of Being” offsets a gorgeous solo from Bley, who cannot help but raise his own voice in the flare of the moment. Phillips’s bass is bright and bleeds into Gurtu’s string of metal (gongs), wood (sticks), and exoskeletons (shells). Harth’s bass clarinet bubbles with finality, fading into a sustained pluck of piano strings.

Accapella
flourishing
descants…
Acoustically
tonic.

“Transformate, Transcend Tones and Images” shows Nicols in fine melodic form. As the album’s last image, seems to thrive at its center. Nicols adlibs the remainder, as if to dissolve these impressions just enough so that no one can claim them. “Woman in a violet tail-coat,” she sings, “blows her soul-blue sax on south bank.” But we never hear that sax. Instead, we get a string of unrecorded words:

…translate…
…transcend…
…transform…

leading us into the unknown discoveries of the journey ahead.

Harth is an attentive player who writes without erasing, sings without opening his mouth, exhales without hypocrisy. His notes are often shared on This Earth!, but he is never the mimic. Among this session’s band mates, Gurtu proves to be a particularly interesting choice. His cymbal-focused work adds the illusion of a full kit without the overbearing weight thereof. Bley and Phillips, on the other hand, are unmistakably present. Yet Nicols’s voice is the real poetry of the album. She transcends the words she sings even as she inhabits them, bringing genuine physicality to their contours.

Another out-of-print gem, its elusiveness makes it all the more visceral an experience once it finds its way to your turntable.

<< Terje Rypdal/David Darling: Eos (ECM 1263)
>> The George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band: ’83 Theatre (ECM 1265)

Azimuth (ECM 1546-48)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1546_48

Azimuth

John Taylor piano, organ, synthesizer
Norma Winstone voice
Kenny Wheeler trumpet, fluegelhorn
Ralph Towner 12-string and classical guitars

Azimuth:
1. The arc of the horizon measured clockwise from the south point, in astronomy, or from the north point, in navigation, to the point where a vertical circle through a given heavenly body intersects the horizon.
2. A group made up of vocalist Norma Winstone, husband John Taylor on keyboards, and trumpeter/fluegelhornist Kenny Wheeler whose music, measured from any point, draws an arc through countless heavenly bodies before intersecting with the enchanted listener.

Azimuth was (and remains) emblematic of the ECM label, marking its timelines from 1977 to 2000 with a handful of indelible punctuations. The group’s characteristically expansive sound was overshadowed only by its utter commitment to the melodic line and the trustworthiness of its expression. In the three albums collected for this timely rerelease, the journeys upon which we are taken are the same as those taken by the musicians themselves. Such immediate correspondence is a rare achievement in any vertical circle, and is to be cherished for its productive honesty.

ECM 1099

Azimuth (ECM 1099)

Recorded March 1977 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The group that would become Azimuth began its journey on this self-titled album. “Siren’s Song” rests on the forgiving laurels of a repeated motif, gilded by a horn-flanked voice amid pianistic accents. Like a Steve Reich riff dropped in a pool of jazz, it treats the pulse as the animating force of its creation. Wheeler broadens Winstone’s palette in the melodic relays of “O.” The title track is buoyed by a stunningly gorgeous arpeggiator, over which Winstone sets to flight a pair of overdubbed birds. Once they have flown away, Wheeler draws between their pinpointed forms a sinuous trajectory, along which one is able to chart the album’s path with even more fluid precision. The synthetic backdrop builds in scope, turning what might otherwise be a repetitive New Age loop into an elegiac improvisational exercise. The plaintive piano introduction of “The Tunnel” extends this supportive electricity, into which Winstone begins to sow her potent words. Semantics trail off into further meanderings, reminiscent of the previous track, before the backdrop morphs into a stunning change of key. This makes “Greek Triangle,” a curious piece for brass, all the more whimsical for its appearance. Though outwardly incongruous, it breathes with the same focused spirit that animates the whole, thereby elevating it beyond the status of fanciful diversion. It also serves to refresh our palette for the lyricism of “Jacob,” in which Winstone’s braids and Wheeler’s fluid accents close an altogether fascinating mosaic of atmospheres.

<< Julian Priester and Marine Intrusion: Polarization (ECM 1098)
>> Keith Jarrett: Sun Bear Concerts (ECM 1100)

… . …

ECM 1130

The Touchstone (ECM 1130)

Recorded June, 1978 at Talent Studio
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Azimuth’s second ECM effort is also the group’s most enigmatic. The organ that underlies “Eulogy” gives just enough air for Wheeler to glide, and injects all that follows with deep, warm breath. The trio writes a more intimate letter in “Silver,” answered in the unsteady penmanship of “Mayday,” over which our soloists take great care to dot every i and cross every t. The distant muted trumpets of “Jero” mesh with Winstone’s ambulatory menageries. Taylor draws a fluid line through their incantations, ignoring the periphery all the way to the end of “Prelude,” a track so lovely that it makes one want to listen to the album backwards. This is an elusive set, to be sure, filled with quiet, seething power, but also one that builds its nests comfortably over our heads. It can only fly, because it knows no other way to travel.

<< Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians (ECM 1129 NS)
>> Pat Metheny: New Chautauqua (ECM 1131)

… . …

ECM 1163

Départ (ECM 1163)

Recorded December 1979 at Talent Studios, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

For its third outing, Azimuth welcomed the strings of guitarist Ralph Towner. “The Longest Day” opens in Solstice territory, setting out through a drizzle of piano and 12-string. Winstone’s overdubs visualize gossamer veils of more distant storms, while Wheeler’s soulful trumpet shines like the sun beyond them. Winstone takes her voice to unexpected heights, pulling a banner of time across the sky into the contemplative piano introduction of “Autumn.” There is no falling. Rather, we get the stillness of those leaves before they die, hanging on with their last vestments of color as the winds arrive to shake them from their boughs. Winstone hangs words in the air amid Towner’s almost pianistic fingerings and Wheeler’s staccato cries. “Arrivée” is just that, but is one of many destinations in this sojourn. Incising solos leave their wounds, closed at last by the plasma of Winstone’s mellifluous protractions. This is followed by a quartet of so-called “Touching Points,” which further extrapolate vocal information from instrumental sources, and vice versa. Wordless fibers are at once spun and frayed in passages of intense physicality. Towner is put to improvisatory task, adding tentative yet appropriate ornaments of his own. The organ drone of the title track respires beneath Winstone’s dips into thermal bliss. Words spread their branches, wrought in tinsel and blown glass. The album ends with a reprise of “The Longest Day” for piano alone. Resplendent and far-reaching, it is a bittersweet ending to Azimuth’s most fully realized effort, through which the project honed its sound to an art.

Azimuth was one of ECM’s most deftly realized acts, and it continues to open like a slow cloudburst every time I immerse myself in it. Its malleable formula provides seemingly endless room for possibility. Winstone’s voice sparkles in the soft focus of consistently sensitive production, a slowly flapping bird with nowhere to go but up. She and Taylor are ideal partners, forging as they do a silent smolder of emotional bonds, while Wheeler heaves his own powerful feathers with conviction. The brief addition of Tower heightens their collective sound, even as it tethers them to the earth. This is a classic set of three seminal albums, each a movement in a larger suite, where souls can dance in motions so slow that they appear as still as ice, and are just as vulnerable to heat.

<< Sam Rivers: Contrasts (ECM 1162)
>> John Abercrombie Quartet: Abercrombie Quartet (ECM 1164)

… . …

<< Bjørnstad/Darling/Rypdal/Christensen: The Sea (ECM 1545)
>> hr-Jazzensemble: Atmospheric Conditions Permitting (ECM 1549/50)

Robyn Schulkowsky/Nils Petter Molvær: Hastening Westward (ECM New Series 1564)

| Tyran Grillo

Robyn Schulkowsky
Nils Petter Molvær
Hastening Westward

Robyn Schulkowsky drums, gong, plate bell, crotales, cymbals, bronze bells
Nils Petter Molvær trumpet
Recorded January 1995 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.”
–Samuel Beckett, Endgame

Berlin-based percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, heard most recently with Kim Kashkashian on Hayren, joins forces with Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær for a singular and lasting document. Schulkowsky has worked with some of the biggest names in modern music—Heinz Holliger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and Iannis Xenakis have all benefited from her dynamic breadth and open precision—but her performance style consistently balances humility with fortitude. In 1991, Schulkowsky composed a percussion ensemble piece entitled “Hastening westward at sundown to obtain a better view of Venus.” The title was lifted from Beckett’s final prose work, Stirrings Still, which, aside from being a vastly important book for Schulkowsky herself, sums up the feeling of this “extension” thereof most succinctly. Originally conceived as a solo project, the album was enriched with a snap decision from Manfred Eicher, who introduced Molvær into the mix. The two musicians had never met, but together they described a challenging world that remains effortless to explore.

The album is comprised of two works. Pier and Ocean, in three parts, begins freely, with more explosive drums lying in wait. Its final part is heaviest, shifting from shamanism to survivalism in a single beat. The title work fills out the bulk of the album. Over seven chapters of varying lengths, it takes its first steps in the whitened paragraphs of a wintry page. A lonesome piano airs its grievances in background. Deep drums inhale the air of mallet percussion. Yet no matter how enervated the music becomes, it always looks down at its own feet. Even the timpanic battle cries in Part 3 are laced with melancholy. Part 4 is the album’s most brilliant, as Molvær falls into a spread of echoed clangs, thus inaugurating a psychosomatic transition from rhythm into rhyme. Part 6 sounds like a seaplane landing on a lake, only we are the water receiving its foreign presence with the same yielding attention as we might give to a bird fishing from our depths. The final “hastening” is anything but, a slow drone with metallic percussion and a few brassy notes divinely attuned to the resonance of gongs.

Sadly, this project was never repeated. Considering the unusual confluence of events that produced it, however, a sequel is hardly necessary. Either way, what it has left behind is solid enough to withstand eons of peripheral development. Hastening Westward is a sublime experience that calls to you when you least expect it. It is neither the thrill of the hunt nor the agony of capture, but the single thread that connects them both.

<< Ralph Towner: Lost And Found (ECM 1563)
>> Mozart: Piano Concertos, etc. (ECM 1565/66 NS)

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: Toward the Margins (ECM New Series 1612)

| Tyran Grillo

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
Toward the Margins

Evan Parker soprano saxophone
Barry Guy double-bass
Paul Lytton percussion, live-electronics
Philipp Wachsmann violin, viola, live electronics, sound processing
Walter Prati live electronics, sound processing
Marco Vecchi live electronics, sound processing
Recorded May 1996, Gateway Studios, Surrey
Engineer: Steve Lowe
Produced by Steve Lake

What’s given:
If ECM had a musical attic, it would sound like Toward the Margins. Not to imply that the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble’s debut is filled with unwanted or forgotten things, but that it exists toward the margins of a human life, its shed skins stacked like boxes above our heads, waiting for a breath to blow the dust away. Parker has been with ECM almost since the beginning, having first appeared on The Music Improvisation Company and subsequently on Gavin Bryars’s After the Requiem, among others. An abiding interest in electronics as an improvisational medium led him to the present project, which draws from disparate disciplines bonded by an infatigable spirit of sound production.

What’s taken away:
Grating strings first clear out the rafters, shafting like light from behind a broken cloud. Parker’s soprano scratches gently at their back. Grumblings and sampled ether flutter and churn, tripping down sand-covered stairs like a creature covered with feet, so that it is always standing no matter how it lands. Compartmentalized echoes share their cubicles with shallow utterances of deeper assignments. Barry Guy’s double bass ties its strings into a tangle of self-awareness as Parker trembles within his own computer-augmented aftershocks. Like a flock of geese in overdrive, he burns in the upper atmosphere before he dares dream of land. Melody is but an afterthought to the sputtering multitudes, caught in the welcoming stare of an unwanted stranger. The overall sound is subdued yet robust. It inhabits the crawlspace of our dreams. The haunting final track lingers in our bones, long after the silence comes, animating a body whose only fear is cogency.

What’s left behind:
Parker is the rare musician who treats improvisation as composition—not so much an offering to the aleatoric gods as a vocabulary articulating its real-time derivations. His saxophonic work is high but far from mighty. He listens more than he plays, as the musicians faithfully tune themselves to a radio signal only they can hear. Washes of precipitation and other climatic changes stipple these aural landscapes, leaving Andy Goldsworthy-like rain shadows in their wake. Sometimes he rolls through rough detours, kicking up sparks and gravel; other times he hovers like an appraising insect, every note a kaleidoscopic cell unfolded into the whole of its vision. As the title makes unabashedly clear, this is an asymptotic experience with nowhere to hide but our ears, and there it burrows, hibernating until the next thaw.

<< Ralph Towner: ANA (ECM 1611)
>> The Hilliard Ensemble: A Hilliard Songbook (ECM 1614/15 NS)

Jack DeJohnette’s Directions: Untitled (ECM 1074)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1074

Jack DeJohnette’s Directions
Untitled

Jack DeJohnette drums, tenor saxophone
John Abercrombie electric and acoustic guitars
Alex Foster tenor and soprano saxophones
Mike Richmond bass, electric bass
Warren Bernhardt piano, electric piano, clavinet, cowbell
Recorded February, 1976 at Talent Studios, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With Untitled, Jack DeJohnette’s Directions popped a jazz milestone into ECM’s prolifically expanding oven, and it still smells as fresh as the day it was baked. Building off DeJohnette’s robust intro to the 14-minute “Flying Spirits,” a compelling quintet completed by guitar (John Abercrombie), bass (Mike Richmond), sax (Alex Foster), and keyboard (Warren Bernhardt) makes for an aerial interweaving of complementary signatures. The band kicks up a whirlwind of activity, leaving DeJohnette’s delicate applications to rustle like the last stray leaves blowing down the road, out of sight but ever in mind. “Pansori Visions” is an eccentric duet of hand drums and detuned guitar, slack strings sounding like the amplified offspring of a koto and a human voice. Not coincidentally, the title refers to a traditional Korean art form of often-satirical storytelling, also to the accompaniment of a single drummer. “Fantastic” is just that, its colorful percussive accents giving way to some infectious saxophonic action. In spite of the killer title, “The Vikings Are Coming” unfolds like something straight out of Pat Metheny’s Watercolors session, again striated by fluent reeds. “Struttin” evolves into a rather punchy face-off between saxophone and guitar, refereed superbly by DeJohnette. The only victory to be had is in the brief but bitter groove as it closes in resolute harmony. Bernhardt’s “Morning Star” begins with a duet of piano and acoustic guitar, the latter always one step behind. From these dream-like beginnings come a pronounced rhythm section and more melodic fortitude from alto. Capping off this invigorating set is “Malibu Reggae,” which slinks like a drunken dancer in slow motion, its delightfully kitsch keyboard gnawing at the edges of our curiosity with a familiar burn. A tune that would have sat easily among John Zorn’s Naked City abstractions in their heyday, it’s a whimsical ending to a powerfully direct album, ever blushing with hints of its own enigma.

These compositions—all but “Morning Star” are by DeJohnette with or without his collaborators—are bright, resilient, and vociferous. Having stood the test of three-plus decades, they will easily hold up to three more, and then some. And while our leader captivates with his usual kinesis, Foster’s vocal modulations and the unobtrusive support network of Abercrombie/Bernhardt/Richmond make this one for the ages. When you’ve had enough blues for one day, Untitled is as good a pick-me-up as you could ask for. A prime candidate for reissue.

<< Pat Metheny: Bright Size Life (ECM 1073)
>> Jan Garbarek: Dansere (ECM 1075)

Collin Walcott: Cloud Dance (ECM 1062)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1062

Collin Walcott
Cloud Dance

Collin Walcott sitar, tabla
John Abercrombie guitar
Dave Holland bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded March 1975 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The late, great Collin Walcott made his proper ECM debut on Cloud Dance (after an appearance three years earlier on Trios/Solos), where he was joined by the Gateway trinity—John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette—for one of his most powerful albums ever to grace ECM’s vinyl (and later, digital, thanks to a vital Touchstone series reissue) grooves. The marrow-warming twang of Walcott’s sitar sets up the opening “Margueritte” to be a long raga, when suddenly Abercrombie’s electric appears in kind, beckoning a chill entourage of bass and drums and touching off a pair of graceful solos from Abercrombie and Holland. The album’s remainder is fleshed out by a variety of intimate configurations. “Night Glider” and “Vadana” both feature guitar, bass, and sitar, the latter two instruments feeding beautifully off one another, the guitar weaving in and out where it may. The two duets between Walcott and Holland, however, are really where this album gilds its worth. Our frontman lays out plush carpets of tabla and sitar on “Prancing” and “Eastern Song,” respectively, over which Holland takes stock of every variation of pattern and thread count. The second of these pieces, while the briefest of the album, is also one of its most mesmerizing. Contrary to what the titles might have us believe, these are all genuinely realized pieces where the word “exotic” is but another puff of smoke in the breeze. And so, the heavy tabla and shawm-like guitar of “Scimitar” describes not the weapon wielded in the hands of countless white actors in uninformed filmic productions, but rather an exploration of the object on its own terms, tracing forms and histories, battles and silences alike, with due abandon. So, too, with the final and title cut that brings DeJohnette back into the mix for an animated closer.

The telephone wires on the cover are like the strings of some large instrument, with the sky as its sound box. Its clouds don’t so much dance as perform, caressing endless waves of voices careening through the ether. The joy of Cloud Dance is that it makes those voices intelligible. Fans of Oregon, of which Walcott was of course an integral part, need look no further for likeminded contemplation.

<< Abercrombie/Holland/DeJohnnette: Gateway (ECM 1061)
>> Enrico Rava: The Pilgrim And The Stars (ECM 1063)

Pat Metheny: Watercolors (ECM 1097)

| Tyran Grillo

1097 X

Pat Metheny
Watercolors

Pat Metheny guitars
Lyle Mays piano
Eberhard Weber bass
Dan Gottlieb drums
Recorded February 1977 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

From the opening strains of Pat Metheny’s second album, we immediately know that we have a calming yet powerful journey ahead of us. The present company—among which keyboardist Lyle Mays, a Pet Metheny Group fixture, makes his first appearance—renders his characteristic combination of form and style into an instinctive wash of comfort. Mays’s pianism proves the perfect complement to the guitarist’s untainted sound. Just listen to the way he buoys the music in the opening title track, and his fluent solo in “River Quay,” and you will hardly be able to imagine the music without him. We get a lingering look at Metheny’s own abilities in “Icefire,” in which he solos on a cleverly tuned 12-string that lobs between solid chords and higher callings. Midway through, the music melts into its second titular half, flowering in a cluster of Ralph Towner-esque harmonics. “Oasis” introduces the harp guitar, a sympathetically strung instrument that shines in Metheny’s hands like the charango in Gustavo Santaolalla’s. A mournful electric sings at its center, ever shielded by an unrequited embrace of acoustics. Varied rhythms and bold chord changes animate its otherwise stagnant beauty. After these quiet submersions, we come up into air, and into light, with the beautiful “Lakes,” which positively glows with quiet ecstasies. Again, Mays broadens the edges to new waterlines, cresting like a wave that never crashes upon its thematic shores. A two-part suite proves a complex call and response with the self before the 10-minute “Sea Song” reprises the harp guitar for its swan song. The music here is beyond aquatic, and could easily have seeded a Ketil Bjørnstad project. Eberhard Weber’s smooth bass introduces the morning’s regular activities with the first rays of sunrise in countless awakening eyes, before rolling out once again, drawn back into the depths like the tide that gives them life.

Metheny’s precision dives and soars, a most selfless bird, his fingers running together like the colors of the album’s title. His supporting crew is in tune at every moment (and one mustn’t fail to praise Dan Gottlieb’s drumming in this regard), protecting every melody with passionate detail. This is perfect music for travel, for the music travels itself. It’s a plane ride above a shimmering landscape, a hang-glide over open valleys, a dive into crystal waters—and yet, our feet never leave the ground. One might call it otherworldly, were it not so firmly rooted in the earth in all its glory. Pure magic from start to finish.

<< Collin Walcott: Grazing Dreams (ECM 1096)
>> Julian Priester and Marine Intrusion: Polarization (ECM 1098)

Chick Corea: Solo Piano (ECM 2140-42)

| Tyran Grillo

Corea Solo Piano

Chick Corea
Solo Piano

Chick Corea piano
Ida Kavafian violin
(Children’s Songs, Track 20)
Fred Sherry cello
(Children’s Songs, Track 20)
Release date: March 26, 2010

Much of the jazz that has come to characterize the “ECM sound” is known for its pellucid solemnity. Conversations between sound and space abound, in which vestiges of their own histories mark the passage of time. To younger listeners like myself, it is sometimes easy to forget that the label remains rooted in the youthful immediacy one finds in these formative efforts from Chick Corea. While his refreshing approach to pianism inhabits the same continent as other formidable players, Corea is very much his own culture. Much of the later material that would come to define the “Corea sound,” however, is in clear evidence throughout these discs, and especially in the improvised efforts.

1014 X

Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 (ECM 1014)

Recorded April 21 & 22, 1971, Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: 1971

From note one, these improvisations abound with the freedom of an artist who is ever at his peak. Their many tender touches and nostalgic leanings are shielded by a powerful optimism. Such exuberance makes them all the more embraceable in their poignancy. Tunes such as “Noon Song” twirl like a skirt in the breeze. Others (“Sometime Ago” and “Song For Sally”) are flirtatious and skip from one thought to another: a love in overdrive. The pièce de résistance, however, is the eight-part suite “Where Are You Now?” In this series of “pictures,” Corea renders for us a film whose soundtrack precedes its images. There are no mysterious titles to ponder; each tells us exactly what we are going to hear. The playing is at once pliant and mechanical, carrying across its feelings with such genuine appreciation for the listener that one cannot help but smile.

<< Dave Holland/Derek Bailey: Improvisations for Cello and Guitar (ECM 1013)
>> Jan Garbarek Quintet: Sart (ECM 1015)

1020

Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 (ECM 1020)
Recorded April 21 & 22, 1971, Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 1, 1972

This companion volume of Corea’s improvisations doesn’t merely continue where the first left off, but fleshes out finer details unexplored in its neglected depths. This volume is more nocturnal than the last, a siesta in songs without words. “After Noon Song” starts us off alluringly before the crisper interjections of Thelonius Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle” and Wayne Shorter’s “Masqualero.” The second act is where the album begins to fray at the edges, and becomes all the more mystical for it. At first, experiments like “Departure From Planet Earth” seem to stray into unnecessarily weighty territory. Yet with each listen, they tell us more about their travels. And while Corea’s often-discussed religious predilections (I dare not invoke the “S” word here) may give us even greater insight into the music’s enigmatic borders, in this instance such forays into biographical details provide little advantage. Either way, Corea reacclimates into “A New Place.” This is polyglot music, of which each melody its own tongue. Though some are more readily interpretable than others, we always know what is trying to be said.

<< Circle: Paris Concert (ECM 1018/19)
>> Keith Jarrett/Jack DeJohnette: Ruta And Daitya (ECM 1021)

1267

Children’s Songs (ECM 1267)
Recorded July 1983 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 1, 1984

By a similar twist of fate that kept me from The Köln Concert for so many years, I only discovered this album recently, and I must say that it deserves a throne alongside Keith Jarrett’s magnum opus for its unfathomable hidden power. Beneath the album’s contemplative veneer beats a furnace of a heart stoked by creative flames, the heights of which are rarely surpassed in today’s genre-hungry climate. Begun in 1971, and recorded here twelve years later, Children’s Songs gives us Chick Corea at his compositional best. At first, the title is an enigma: Are these songs to be played by children or for children? But as we soon discover, the child has already outgrown itself. Like clouds, these pieces take on whatever shapes we project onto them. On the one hand, their steady obbligatos and carefully chosen points of contact resemble the latent energies of Philip Glass (No. 1) and Steve Reich (No. 9). On the other, they pantomime a range of influences, from ragtime to Satie (No. 19 is like something lifted straight out of Gymnopédies) to Bartók (the Mikrokosmos parallels being almost too obvious to mention). One can also clearly see how influential this music must have been to others. The filmic beauty of No. 4 cannot have been lost, for example, on Michael Nyman. These are also pieces about contrast. Take, for example, the left hand in No. 6, which lays out a triadic darkness, while the right hand insists on spinning light before our very eyes. Corea’s characteristic ornaments, as in the descending trill at end of No. 3, grow richer every time, and the sweeping elegies of No. 10, 12, and 13 allow the Corea we know and love to shine through. Violin and cello add delightful pliancy to the “Addendum,” a classically minded closer that puts a stylish bow on an already crisply wrapped package.

Corea and his legacy blossom at every moment throughout these three seminal albums, with which he singlehandedly revitalized the solo piano program as an art form to be taken seriously in the post-Art Tatum era. He is the reliable narrator, the quiet provocateur, and the entertainer. He is also none of these. He bids us to listen without pretense, knowing that a carefully defined surface is nothing without the depth to support it. At the same time, he wastes no time in trying to intellectualize what lies beneath, secure in the knowledge that his music will carry on the conversation. This is an essential collection that belongs on any ECM fan’s shelf, not to mention a prime candidate for reissue of the century.

<< Rainer Brüninghaus: Continuum (ECM 1266)
>> Ulrich P. Lask: Sucht+Ordnung (ECM 1268)

 

Tomasz Stanko: Balladyna (ECM 1071)

| Tyran Grillo

Balladyna

Tomasz Stanko
Balladyna

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Tomasz Szukalski tenor and soprano saxophones
Dave Holland bass
Edward Vesala drums
Recorded December 1975, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

I can only imagine the reactions Tomasz Stanko garnered with Balladyna, his first recording for ECM. The no-holds-barred “First Song” jumps into action with that hard swing that can only come from Dave Holland. Add to this brew the wide-ranging percussion of Edward Vesala and the spicy solos of our frontman and Tomsaz Szukalski, and you have a jambalaya to savor and remember. After such a climactic opener, Stanko could play “Happy Birthday” for all I care. Thankfully (though who knows what this quartet might have done with such ubiquity?) we a get the Ornette Coleman-infused “Tale” that faithfully charts a key transition from raw to cooked jazz. One can feel the rapt attention with which each musician listens to the other.

Original Balladyna
Original cover

This live, interactive energy continues in “Num,” sustained by knitted cymbal work as the two Tomaszes go head to ecstatic head. A killer bass solo makes the cut complete. A lumbering Holland/Stanko interlude opens the door on the title number, anteing up in tutti before spreading its hand into a straight improvisatory flush. Stanko screeches above a pointillist rhythm section, Szukalski stepping into the footprints he leaves behind. A doleful, mocking tone returns in the tongue-in-cheekly titled “Last Song,” nodding like a head succumbing to sleep. The fine horn playing makes this one a standout. The actual last song, “Nenaliina,” is an effusive spring of percussion with a brassy tail.

After all these years, the teeth of Balladyna still make for quite a bite. Anyone wanting to hear the label’s heartbeat in its prime need place an ear to no other chest.

<< Keith Jarrett: Arbour Zena (ECM 1070)
>> Gary Burton Quintet: Dreams So Real (ECM 1072)