Jazz

Gianluigi Trovesi/Stefano Montanari: Stravaganze consonanti (ECM 2390)

| Tyran Grillo

Gianluigi Trovesi
Stefano Montanari
Stravaganze consonanti


Gianluigi Trovesi piccolo clarinet, alto clarinet, alto Saxophone
Stefano Montanari concertmaster
Stefano Rossi second violin
Claudio Andriani viola
Francesco Galligioni violoncello
Luca Bandini double bass
Emiliano Rodolfi oboe
Pryska Comploi second oboe
Alberto Guerra bassoon, dulciana
Riccardo Balbinutti percussion
Ivano Zanenghi archlute
Valeria Montanari harpsichord
Fulvio Maras percussion, electronics
Recorded January 2014 at Sala musicale giardino, Cremona
Engineer: Roberto Chinellato
Mixed September 2021 at Artesuono Studio, Udine
by Gianluigi Trovesi, Stefano Montanari, Guido Gorna, and Stefano Amerio (engineer)
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
An ECM Production
Release date: February 24, 2023

Italian reed virtuoso Gianluigi Trovesi and baroque violinist Stefano Montanari (doubling here as concertmaster) lead an ensemble of period instruments for a fresh take on the music of the 15th through 17th centuries. Meshing melodies from towering figures of the Renaissance and Baroque with equally visionary interpretations, the program manages to carve new initials into old pillars without marring their beauty. Some new compositions by Trovesi, plus a couple of improvisations with Fulvio Maras (percussion, electronics), complete the mix.

The album’s title, which translates as “consonant extravagances,” offers an accurate description of what is happening sonically, creatively, and even spiritually. “The Witches’ Dance” (from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas) leads off on a courtly foot. Purcell makes a handful of appearances throughout, most gorgeously as a motivic inspiration for Trovesi’s “For a While.” Like all of his pieces, it benefits from the robustness of Corrado Guarino’s arrangements, which take advantage of the period instrument ensemble under Montanari’s charge. The latter brings the crispness of strings to “Consonanze stravaganti” by Giovanni Maria Trabaci (an influence on Girolamo Frescobaldi), Guillaume Dufay’s Missa L’homme armé, and a sonata by Giovanni Battista Buonamente. Whether threading his alto through Andrea Falconieri’s “La suave melodia” or revealing his compositional wonders in “L’ometto disarmato” and the alto clarinet jaunt of “Bergheim,” Trovesi is a force of nature shapeshifting between song and cry on the turn of a dime. If the past is alive in his sound, then so is the future.

(This review originally appeared in the January 2024 edition of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)

Trio Tapestry: Our Daily Bread (ECM 2777)

| Tyran Grillo

Trio Tapestry
Our Daily Bread

Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato, gongs
Marilyn Crispell piano
Carmen Castaldi drums, gong, temple bells
Recorded May 2022, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: May 5, 2023

Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry is one of the profoundest projects to grace ECM records in recent years, and for this, the group’s third round, we are welcomed into a chamber within a chamber within a chamber. This set of eight Lovano originals, each written exclusively for the project, draws from the wells of pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Carmen Castaldi, whose gifts of abundance unwrap themselves to reveal one grace after another.

“All Twelve” takes a 12-tone approach to the proverbial welcome mat, greeting us with open arms and closed eyes. Lovano takes liminal account of Crispell’s architecture, rendering an experience that takes two steps inward for every step outward. The ghosts of albums past linger with a loose developmental feel. Every motif, as much a child of atmosphere as of melody, works a speech-like filigree into every wall, sconce, and pew. Like “The Power Of Three” and “Crystal Ball” that come later, its introspections have the presence of someone who has absorbed the world to squeeze out only its most inclusive drops.

Despite an overarching solace, there is variety to be found. Where “Rhythm Spirit” is a heartfelt duet for tenor and drums highlighting breathy lows and delicate highs, “Grace Notes” floats the tarogato on a seascape of dreamy complexion, Castaldi’s cymbals hinting at a groove that never catches, buried instead in the crashing brine. On “One For Charlie,” Lovano returns to tenor with a monologue dedicated to the late Charlie Haden.

At the heart of this session are two balladic verses. The snaking indeterminacy of “Le Petit Opportun” and the title track’s potent lyricism give us plenty to savor even as they savor us. This is chaos theory in slow motion and proof that if this album is a match between day and night, the latter has surely won.

(This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)

Jakob Bro/Joe Lovano: Once Around The Room – A Tribute To Paul Motian (ECM 2747)

| Tyran Grillo

Jakob Bro
Joe Lovano
Once Around The Room: A Tribute To Paul Motian

Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Jakob Bro guitar
Larry Grenadier double bass
Thomas Morgan double bass
Anders Christensen bass guitar
Joey Baron drums
Jorge Rossy drums
Recorded November 2021 at The Village Recording, Copenhagen
Engineer: Thomas Vang
Cover photo: Woong Chul An
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 4, 2022

Guitarist Jakob Bro and saxophonist Joe Lovano head an ensemble that includes bassists Larry Grenadier and Thomas Morgan, bass guitarist Anders Christensen, and drummers Joey Baron and Jorge Rossy in a sprawling tribute to drummer and composer Paul Motian. That the set includes only one tune by Motian proper (“Drum Music”) is by no means an oversight but a testament to its dedicatee’s spirit, which continues to glow in musicians who cup its embers with reverant care. Rather than simply recreate or distill Motian’s personal and creative principles, the band expands on them with heartfelt accuracy.

“As It Should Be” is the first of two pieces by Lovano (the second being “For The Love Of Paul”). It also opens the curtain with a swell of patient beauty as only ECM could render. The atmosphere is rich, far-reaching, yet always firm in its immediacy. Bro’s guitar architects the pulsing kingdom over which Lovano’s tenor reigns supreme, a melodic giant of kindest temperament. The freely improvised “Sound Creation” follows with a near-ritual quality, made all the more clairvoyant by Lovano’s tarogato before the tenor dances in its dust clouds.

Bro offers two tunes of his own: “Song To An Old Friend” and “Pause.” Between delicate arpeggios and tender melodizing, he stands to the side of either foreground, content in avoiding the spotlight to be heard rather than seen. Nestled between them is the above-mentioned “Drum Music,” which yields scorching playing from the leads. After some thoughtful building, a squeal for the ages from Lovano’s tenor makes for an unforgettable catharsis.

That the recording was made on the 10th anniversary of Motian’s death only shows how much he lives on in the articulations of those who knew him best. Having played in the drummer’s trio with Bill Frisell for 30 years, Lovano should know that a strong metaphysical melody can be enough to make the departed feel near again.

Keith Jarrett: Bordeaux Concert (ECM 2740)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett
Bordeaux Concert

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded live July 6, 2016
at Auditorium, Opéra National, Bordeaux
Producer: Keith Jarrett
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Mastering: Christoph Stickel
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 14, 2022

Every new release of a Keith Jarrett recording activates something old—ancient, if you will. By this, I mean to suggest that his immaterial approach to a resolutely material instrument invites us to appreciate the synergy of being and non-being. To experience his notecraft, whether in person or via ECM’s relentless charting of his footsteps, is to understand that a physical body is required to interpret even abstract realities. And in the 13-part odyssey we have here, we encounter one of the most spiritual gifts to take flight from Jarrett’s fingertips.

From the same tour that brought such wonders to light as Munich 2016 and Budapest Concert comes this July 6th performance at the Auditorium de l’Opéra National de Bordeaux. In this spontaneous mosaic of waves and dissolutions thereof, he articulates an ocean’s worth of expanse. If Part I can be said to burst forth as if in need of being heard after a long silence, Part XIII intones the whisper of low tide. Between them, he unleashes a rhapsodic account of muscle and morality.

Flexibility is central to these pieces in the making, nowhere more so than in Part III. This breath of fresh balladic air is road music for the heart. There’s something painfully final about it, a tearful evocation of mortal ends. It also passes on hope to those left behind. Occasional dissonances hint at bittersweetness, always returning to the foreground with bits of the past polished and placed carefully on an altar for the future.

So begins a grand sequence of somber inner visions. Without ever losing sight of a certain playfulness of childhood (as in the spiral staircase of Part V), he navigates hymnal block chords (Part VI) and savory vamps with grace. Crooning his way through the valley, he ensures that beauty never becomes an idol. For while the lyrical fulcrum of Part VII, for example, veers into sunlight, Jarrett is quick to don the shades of Part VIII, bringing temperance such as only the blues can claim.

But if the feeling of farewell peaks in Part XII, it’s only because the destination is nearer than our point of departure. In such moments, we step outside of time, wearing it like a coat. We can reach into any pocket and pull out an episode of our lives, slicing away at infinity like a doctor in search of a cure.

Ralph Alessi Quartet: It’s Always Now (ECM 2722)

| Tyran Grillo

Ralph Alessi Quartet
It’s Always Now

Ralph Alessi trumpet
Florian Weber piano
Bänz Oester double bass
Gerry Hemingway drums
Recorded June 2021, ArteSuono Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Mixed December 2022 at Radiostudio RSI, Lugano by Manfred Eicher and Stefano Amerio
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 17, 2023

Trumpeter Ralph Alessi returns to ECM with his fourth leader date for the label, this time with a newly minted European quartet that reflects his relocation to Switzerland in 2020. Alongside Florian Weber (piano), Bänz Oester (bass), and Gerry Hemingway (drums), he carves out a vivid baker’s dozen of original material.

“Hypnagogic” not only sets a tone but also establishes the album’s heart, the veins and arteries of which are traced with anatomical faithfulness by Alessi and Weber. It’s one of a handful of duo turns (including the subcutaneous title track) building on their nearly 20-year relationship as sonic allies. Abstract yet comforting, their dialogues feel like waking from a dream yet holding on to its fading tendrils. The effect is such that when the light of “Migratory Party” reveals a rhythm section trailing an even longer history, the band’s ability to balance independent voices and melismatic intermingling reigns supreme.

Both as musician and composer, Alessi creates constant washes of color. Whether in the groovier strains of “Residue” (a fantastic testimony of Oester’s talents) or in the nocturnal urbanism of “The Shadow Side” and “Diagonal Lady,” he navigates every moment as a director would a scene of actors improvising within a loose script. The latter two tunes have a three-dimensional feel that yields the album’s deepest magic.

When at its most forthright (“His Hopes, His Fears, His Tears” and “Everything Mirrors Everything”), the band swings forward and backward rather than side to side, while the dramatic resolution of “Hanging by a Thread” leads perfectly to the concluding “Tumbleweed,” bringing us back to where it all began.

(This review originally appeared in the April 2023 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, a full PDF of which is available here.)

Enrico Rava/Fred Hersch: The Song Is You (ECM 2746)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fred Hersch
The Song Is You

Enrico Rava flugelhorn
Fred Hersch piano
Recorded November 2021
Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 9, 2022

Pianist Fred Hersch makes his ECM debut in intimately grand fashion with maestro Enrico Rava on flugelhorn. Their meeting at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI yields some of the most effortless jazz you’ll likely hear this year. Hersch’s opening embrace eases us into Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Retrato em Branco e Preto” as if the set could open no other way, fanning expository poetry in place of lantern flame. An old-town quality prevails, navigating cobblestone streets on tiptoe yet never losing its footing.

Contrary to immediate expectation, this is followed by a free improvisation, which tempers the familiar with new shades of meaning. George Bassman’s “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” gets a delicate and rhythmically endearing treatment, while the title track by Jerome Kern is enigmatically transformed into a crystalline snowdrift of memory. Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” walks a fine line between dream and reality, giving way to artful abstractions that reveal two minds with lifetimes more to say, as do the originals that precede it. Whereas “Child’s Song” (Hersch) conveys innocence with a nostalgic, summery feel that harks to yesteryears, “The Trial” (Rava) renders an entanglement of spiral staircases and other modern architectural details. All of this leaves Hersch alone with “’Round Midnight,” floating into the promise of a new day, uncertain though it may be.

These musicians achieve the extraordinary by sounding like one unit without sacrificing their voices. They dance as few know how, unfolding a love letter one page at a time until only a wax seal seems appropriate to protect its contents from the sun’s bleaching touch.

Julia Hülsmann Quartet: The Next Door (ECM 2759)

| Tyran Grillo

Julia Hülsmann Quartet
The Next Door

Uli Kempendorff tenor saxophone
Julia Hülsmann piano
Marc Muellbauer double bass
Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded March 2022
Studio La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Thomas Herr
Release date: August 26, 2022

Although Julia Hülsmann has crafted a hearty sequence of trio records for ECM, including 2017’s Sooner and Later, there has always been something even more intimate and honed about her quartet with tenor saxophonist Uli Kempendorff, bassist Marc Muellbauer, and drummer Heinrich Köbberling, as is refreshingly obvious throughout “Empty Hands,” in which Hülsmann throws notes like petals onto the waters of life to see where they might flow. As they did on this album’s predecessor, Not Far From Here, these effortlessly attuned musicians navigate her sound with familial affinity. After “Made Of Wood” deconstructs the introductory mood, a melodic breeze wafts over the keys, carrying over into “Jetzt Noch Nicht.” Taking two forms—initially as a duet with Kempendorff, later as a swinging outing for all four—it delicately offsets tracks like “Fluid,” an emblematic realization of their capabilities that rejoices in the ongoing moment.

Muellbauer contributes three originals with a more geometric approach to time and harmony. In his “Polychrome,” the piano is a wavering shadow, the saxophone a refraction of light stepping sideways past us, while in “Wasp At The Window,” a locomotive whimsy ensues. The landscape outside our window remains the same, but its description changes along the way. Hülsmann’s ability to carry so much cargo in so fine a mesh is marvelous. Kempendorff and Köbberling offer a tune apiece. The former’s “Open Up” balances emotiveness and restraint, and the latter’s “Post Post Post” is a standout for its liminal expressivity.

No Hülsmann set would be complete without an ode to the popular canon, and her reading of Prince’s “Sometimes It Snows In April” is no exception. With charming comfort, it promises hope at the end of a long and harmful tunnel that none of us saw coming.

Pascale Berthelot: Saison Sècrete (RJAL 397037)

| Tyran Grillo

Pascale Berthelot
Saison Secrète

Pascale Berthelot piano
Recorded November 29, 2018
Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastered by Nicolas Baillard at La Buissonne Mastering Studio
Steinway grand piano prepared and tuned by Alain Massonneau
Release date: October 26, 2020

Pianist Pascale Berthelot, a remarkable interpreter of (and favorite among) living composers, becomes one herself—in a sense—throughout this program of five extended improvisations. Liberated at the behest of Gérard de Haro, engineer and head of Studios La Buissonne in France, these unabashedly visual evocations of in-the-moment imaginings constitute one of the most multidimensional piano recordings I’ve heard in years. While its impressionism lays its head as much on the shoulder of Poulenc as Jarrett, it shapes itself one body part at a time without the ultimate need for such comparative garments. Regardless of the lines of reckoning we might connect from Earth to its distant galaxy, it validates the listener’s imagination, and in that spirit I offer mine in return.

“Balance des étoiles” opens the curtains as if in expectation of morning but instead finds the moon masquerading as the sun, rising in mimicry of dawn. The toes become restless for the feel of soil between them, the heart for a lamp to light the way. What began as a reverie ends as a descent into ocean, where prose and poetry comingle until the difference is impossible to make out. In “Ciel s’illune,” the sky and earth are flipped, so that another distinction—that between inhalation and exhalation—is rendered mythological. When we at last get to the center of this genetic spiral, “Nuits, chères” abandons the lie of tranquility for the truth of its unsettling, thus evoking the bliss and deeper love that a relationship conflict can yield. Even in “Chambre sans langage,” in which the intonations of dampened piano strings resound like a knock at the door, spiritual tendencies move beyond prayer into communion. And so, when the dream of “Clair éclat de l’M” lights a ponderous candle with its tongue, it adds one last link to the chain we’ve been extending all along, dragging behind us a memory box whose contents we have already forgotten.

And yet, we mustn’t fool ourselves into thinking that the world Berthelot describes existed before these utterances. Rather, we experience it as she does, unfolding in real time at the touch of flesh and key until something inevitable arises. Thus, the recording itself is a song made up by a child lost in the woods, holding on to lullabies as the only answers to her questions of fear and emerging all the stronger for it.

Barre Phillips/György Kurtág jr.: Face à Face (ECM 2735)

| Tyran Grillo

Barre Phillips
György Kurtág jr.
Face à Face

Barre Phillips double bass
György Kurtág jr. live electronics
Recording/mixing:
September 2020 – September 2021
Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
by Gérard de Haro, Manfred Eicher,
György Kurtág jr., and Barre Phillips
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: August 19, 2022

Although Barre Phillips and György Kurtág jr., respective virtuosos of the double bass and electronics, first collaborated by chance, one might not know it by the interlacing qualities of Face à Face. Each artist translates the other’s language in a borderless loop of communication, so that by the end we are one step closer to sharing their lexicon.

They begin in subterranean space, listening as if with the tympanal organs of a beetle to the stirrings of labyrinth makers. And maybe they never plant feet aboveground, more content to abandon the light for other forms of perception. Despite hints of the outside world in the sampled drums of “Two By Two” and the kalimba of “Across The Aisle,” our flesh always feels caught by something we cannot readily touch except in thought. Still, a feeling of tactility reigns.

The briefest excursions never reach two minutes, while the longest ones exceed only four. Among the latter, “Chosen Spindle” travels into backlit caves of memory, where seemingly infinite regressions flirt with the here and now.

Phillips is a sage of the bow, turning harmonies into shaded reveries that speak of decades leading to their emergence. In “Extended Circumstances,” he sings with mythical electricity in folds of cricket-like chatter. His pizzicato, too, moves vocally through the refractions of “Ruptured Air.” Kurtág plays his instrument (a practically biomechanical array of synthesizers and digital percussion) as a physical appendage, never letting go even when placing a shushing finger in the foreground. “Sharpen Your Eyes” is a remarkable example of his structural sensibilities, artfully suited to the bassist’s renderings of space. Their deepest integration takes form in the ironically titled “Stand Alone,” wherein mitochondrial anthems resound. Even “Forest Shouts” speaks in quiet streams of thought, each ripple extending a hand to pull us upstream to where it all began.

If asked to compare this to another album, I might nominate Heiner Goebbels’s Stifters Dinge, to which this may be heard as an electronic counterpart. Both are dreams awaiting visitors.