My latest review for RootsWorld online magazine is of Jean-Louis Matinier and Marco Ambrosini’s Inventio. For what it’s worth, this is so far (and by far) my favorite ECM release of the 21st century. No exaggeration. Click the cover to read my review and hear samples of this phenomenal album.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano
Michelle Makarski violin
Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded November 2010 at American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production
J. S. Bach’s Six Sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord (BWV 1014-1019) are not often recorded on piano, but few masters of the modern keyboard could make the combination work so articulately as Keith Jarrett. Although he might just as well have opted for harpsichord, as he did in duet with violist Kim Kashkashian for a benchmark recording of Bach’s Three Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord (ECM New Series 1501), this time around the piano seems an intuitive choice. And for a partner, Michelle Makarski is ideal. Not only because she and Jarrett had been playing these pieces together on their own time for two years before stepping into the studio, but more importantly because she recognizes the power of an unfettered performance that serves the music over ego.
Written in the early 1720s during Bach’s Cöthen period, which encompassed both the tragedy of his first wife’s death and the triumph of his Brandenburg Concerti, these sonatas have rarely sounded more tessellated. There is a rounded quality to Jarrett’s pianism, which cushions Makarski’s pin-like precision. Thus, to the common characterization of the violin and keyboard as equal partners in these pieces, Makarski and Jarrett seem to say, “Let’s just see where the music leads us.” And indeed, spotlights of favor fall on either instrument at different points throughout the cycle.
Half of the sonatas are in major keys (Nos. 2 in A Major, 3 in E Major, and 6 in G Major), the other half in minor (Nos. 1 in b minor, 4 in c minor, and 5 in f minor). The majors are distinguished by their dulcet introductions and masterful harmonies, but each has its own idiosyncrasies. Where No. 2 balances spiraling architecture with pointillist delicacies, the astonishing No. 3 boasts interlocking color schemes and a heartrending Adagio, in which the violin emotes with all the history of a folksong. Yet the Sonata No. 6 is the most maturely constructed of them all. From its opening courtship of wing and wind, through the uniquely solo keyboard meditation at sonata center, and on to the boisterous finish, it follows a downright linguistic arc of development.
It is sometimes tempting to treat slow movements in Baroque repertoire as filler. Not so here, for in them Bach has cut some of the most precious jewels of his entire oeuvre. In addition to their robustness and lyrical integrity, Makarski’s uniquely nuanced vibrato lends them sanctity over ornament. Whether shining through Jarrett’s laden branches in the Andante of the Sonata No. 1 or chaining double stops through the Adagio of the Sonata No. 5, she treats each draw of the bow as a song in and of itself. Jarrett, by contrast, excels in the faster portions, showing in the final Allegro of No. 1 why his sense of rhythm is so acutely suited to Bach. The two find deepest equilibrium in the Sonata No. 4, which is like one giant helix, unbreakable and spinning.
The album’s booklet contains no notes—rare for an ECM classical release. Then again, the music has all the notes it needs. These roll off the fingers of the present interpreters like fluent speech from the tongue, creating a book on the first listen, the binding of which will only strengthen as its cover is opened time and again.
(To hear samples of Six Sonatas for Violin and Piano, click here.)
Carolin Widmann
Alexander Lonquich
Schubert: Fantasie C-Dur, etc.
Carolin Widmann violin
Alexander Lonquich piano
Recorded October 2010, Historischer Reitstadel, Neumarkt
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher
“We cry, knowing in untold happiness, that this music is as it is in the promise of what one day we ourselves will be. This is music we cannot decipher, but it holds up to our blurred, over-brimming eyes the secret of reconciliation at long last.”
–Theodor W. Adorno, “Schubert” (1928),
trans. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey
If Adorno’s thoughts on Franz Schubert seem as indecipherable as the music they describe, it’s only because I have taken them out of context, arriving as they do at the tail end of a dense essay. Similarly, the C-Major Fantasie of 1827 that begins this all-Schubert program from violinist Carolin Widmann and pianist Alexander Lonquich comes to us excised from the tail end of a dense life. Just shy of 31, Schubert would die 11 months after committing it to paper in bipolar flurry of activity. The piece is widely considered to be the most significant he ever composed for violin, and is distinguished by the technical and emotional demands it places on worthy performers. Even Adorno was ambivalent about the overall success of the Fantasie, rightly praising its protracted Andantino as a melancholy masterstroke while in the same breath criticizing the final Presto as something of a cop-out. If we are to take the implications of this reaction to their fullest, however, then we must also accept that Schubert was less at ease proclaiming endings than he was contemplating their inevitability.
Over a traversal of seven movements, Widmann’s tone control yields thrilling restraint and expectorations by turns, while Lonquich matches her every move with an inward-looking fluidity. Together they crumple rays of light into balls of shadow, tossing them over cliffs of uncertainty until they learn to fly. To the latter end, the Allegretto has never sounded so uplifting than in their hands. With unforced drive and organic handling of tempi, the duo articulates the aforementioned Andantino as if it were a lullaby they’d heard since the cradle. In true Schubertian fashion, they feel intimately connected at a distance, stretching between them a connective emotional reserve. In so doing, they deviate from ECM’s previous recording of this piece (New Series 1699) by way of a less parallel approach that emphasizes the final movement’s reversal of the first.
Schubert’s Opus 70, the b-minor Rondo brilliant of 1826, fills the program’s sweet center with an intriguing diptych. A declamatory Andante sets up a nearly 12-minute Allegro, of which the running melodies and gorgeous key changes reveal a crystalline intellect at play. There is a seemingly inexhaustible energy about this piece, which cracks open each potential ending like an egg and scrambles it back into the shell.
The A-Major Sonata of 1817 closes with the youngest work of the program. Some Beethoven influence is palpable, especially in the leaping Scherzo, but the methodical, nuanced airiness of the opening Allegro is all Schubert, as are the kaleidoscopic Andantino and sly finale. Hearing Widmann and Lonquich navigate its many corridors, one may agree with their characterization of Schubert as the proverbial wanderer, but to these ears their interpretations depict the opposite. It was not Schubert but the landscape in which Adorno situated him that wandered in concentric circles, leaving the composer to pick and choose his songs until the circles closed their mouths far too early.
(To hear samples of this album, click here.)
Keith Jarrett
Charlie Haden
Paul Motian
Hamburg ’72
Keith Jarrett piano, soprano saxophone, flute, percussion
Charlie Haden double bass
Paul Motian drums, percussion
NDR-Jazz-Workshop 1972
Radio producer: Michael Naura
Recording engineer: Hans-Heinrich Breitkreuz
Recorded live June 14, 1972 in Hamburg
Remixed July 12, 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
We may only speculate as to the untold Keith Jarrett riches still locked away in ECM’s vaults. The releases of Sleeper and, more recently, No End were but the tip of what is shaping up to be a majestic mountain indeed. Where those albums respectively showed us Jarrett’s European Quartet and homebody experiments, here lies something in between: a fearless document of a composer and improviser at the top of his game. Make that three.
We may make much of the fact that bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian are no longer with us, and that hearing them in this impervious creative triangle is like witnessing a resurrection. The trio was Jarrett’s first power group and had been in existence for six years already before the capture of this live recording at Hamburg’s NDR Funkhaus. Mixed by Manfred Eicher from the master tapes with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in 2014—one day, we learn from the album’s press release, after Haden’s death—it is now in the public ear and here to stay.
We may marvel at the nostalgic archaeology of Jarrett’s compositions, of which the thumbnail “Life, Dance” is exclusive to this album. Its breath of an intro gives the floor to Haden, who confirms mastery in less than three minutes. Haden and Jarrett slip hand-to-glove in “Everything That Lives Laments,” only now the pianist abandons keys for the spirit song of a wooden flute over Motian’s jangling percussion. Haden works the land until the piano sprouts from it like a tree. The sunny-side-up “Piece For Ornette” reminds us not only of Haden’s former tenure with Coleman, but also of what Jarrett might have been in another life: a soprano saxophonist of invention and merit. His dance finds purchase on an invigorating carpet, as laid down by attuned rhythmatists, lighting up the sky with firework potential. Motian is no less incendiary, but lights his playing as if by match to kerosene, keen to catch the ashes of Jarrett’s high-velocity chromatism in hands cupped like upturned cymbals. Lastly for this crop is “Take Me Back,” in which Haden’s echoes yield more reactive bassing. Equal parts jam band session (listen for Jarrett on tambourine for a spell before diving back into the keyboard) and gospel gush, it launches the trio into a prime, if not primal, groove.
We may further delight in the album’s outer edges. “Rainbow” opens with a hands-in-the-earth intro from Jarrett, whose first wife Margot pens the tune. In realizing the latter’s thematic structure, the full trio slides organically into place. Motian’s starry cymbals are foregrounded, while Jarrett caroms from one to another, leaving constellations in his wake. At the other end is “Song For Che,” which in this intimate, 15-minute version unclogs previously neglected arteries of interpretation. As the crowning jewel of Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, it defines personal and historic eras alike. After the leaping and lurking of Jarrett’s soprano, Haden works his arco magic to call the piano back into being before wading through the marsh alone toward closure, alive as ever.
We may do all of this and more, but forget that every act becomes part of the grander archive the moment it transpires. So while you’re enjoying this surprise dug up from the past with a glass of wine, take a moment to stare at your own reflection in that circle of burgundy and know that you are part of the music’s history as well.
(To hear samples of Hamburg ’72, click here.)
Julia Hülsmann Quartet
In Full View
Julia Hülsmann piano
Tom Arthurs trumpet, flugelhorn
Marc Muellbauer double bass
Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded June 2012 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
The harbor becomes the sea
And lighting the house keeps its collision free
Understand the lay of the land
And don’t let it hurt you or it will be the first to
–Feist
After the successes of The End Of A Summer and Imprint, pianist Julia Hülsmann joins bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling for another round, only now with new collaborator Tom Arthurs on trumpet. Arthurs is a musician whose Kenny Wheeler-like feel for color and collaborations with other ECM artists makes him an inevitable fit for the label. Thus reborn, the Julia Hülsmann Quartet leaps into action with swing and vigor.
Much of said vigor comes by way of Muellbauer, whose pen begets the album’s hippest and most atmospheric numbers in kind. In the former vein we have “Quicksilver” and “Dedication,” in which Hülsmann takes the listener on journeys of discovery. In the latter vein, “Gleim” is a noteworthy gem. Between the composer’s soothing intro and Hülsmann’s floating clusters stretches an avenue of muted trumpet, along which Arthurs walks as if humming to himself. Köbberling’s sole offering is “Forever Old,” in which the drummer skims the surface of many oceans while Muellbauer surveys the coast in Arthurs’s footsteps toward a tessellated lighthouse. “Richtung Osten,” by Köbberling’s wife Fumi Udo, throws a narrower spotlight on Muellbauer, who traces peaks and valleys over the band’s rubato mappings.
Hülsmann contributes four tunes, including the bop-leaning title track and the syllogistic highlight, “Spiel.” In each one can hear her fanning approach to improvisation, as also in the photorealistic “Snow, melting.” For more than effect, she throws in two surprises. First is “The Water,” by Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, arranged here for the trio and crafted with subtle assurance. Second is the muted “Nana,” a lullaby from Manuel de Falla’s “Siete Canciones Populares Españolas” cycle.
From beginning to end, In Full View holds true to its vision without error. Fans of the trio are sure to feel right at home among the new company, for Arthurs provides many pleasures along the way, and even an intimate tune of his own: “Forgotten Poetry.” Which is precisely what this album is not. You will want to remember every word.
(To hear samples of In Full View, watch the video above or click here.)
Aaron Parks
Arborescence
Aaron Parks piano
Recorded November 2011 at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA
Engineer: Rick Kwan
Mixed at Avatar Studios, New York
Produced by Sun Chung
Into the forest again
whence all roads depend
this way and that
to lead him back.
–Robert Creeley
Aaron Parks’s solo ECM debut might just as well be called “Arbor Essence.” Not only because each of its 11 improvised tracks grows however it wants to, but also because as a forest they provide shelter from rain and screen against the sun’s blinding rays. The album belongs unquestionably alongside Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel and any number of Keith Jarrett records as a significant contribution to the solo piano archive, though it owes as much to Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Paul Bley.
With so much foliage to reckon with, it’s no wonder Parks begins “Asleep In The Forest.” The apparent expanse of his playing is only enhanced by the engineering, which places us with him among the branches, looking down at the comings and goings of fauna below and wearing moonlight like a shroud. “Toward Awakening” confirms this feeling of night in a dreamlike pulse and builds waves with a surrendering intensity not heard since The Köln Concert. Unlike that classic predecessor, this excursion bleeds in more intimate ways, shared not with an audience of flesh but a congregation of souls. An awakening, yes, but into a realization that one always returns to slumber.
Like the album as a whole, “Past Presence” is a study in contrasts, of depth-soundings and highborn prayers. It’s a fantasy novel come to life, and in which kingdoms are built on foundations of magic just as they are undone by the same. In the looming shadow of its castle is where Parks follows more robust threads of melody in “Elsewhere,” an eerily distorted ballad of seeking and forgiveness that touches the horizon like a match to candlewick. So peaceful is its skewed vision of reality that the mechanisms of “In Pursuit” come as something of a surprise. In them is a whiff of philosophy that lingers over interlocking hands, the left’s rising bass lines bolstering the right’s gossamer speech. “Squirrels” and “Branchings” are, respectively, more whimsical and poetic, while “Homestead” favors the grays and browns of an Andrew Wyeth painting, its nautilus resting beneath a billowing curtain and chambered by the will to be heard.
This is one of those quintessential ECM albums that would not have existed without the label’s tireless archive on which to build, for one will catch hints of mainstays Ketil Bjørnstad (“River Ways”) and Arvo Pärt (“A Curious Bloom”) in addition to the ones already mentioned. By expanding minds on either side of the genre fence, it bespeaks the joy of creation for any who will take it—a gift without wrapping but the embrace of a welcoming ear.
(To hear samples of Arborescence, click here.)
Stefano Battaglia Trio
Songways
Stefano Battaglia piano
Salvator Maiore bass
Roberto Dani drums
Recorded April 2012, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
When Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities, “And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music,” one might finish: that music comes from the pen of Stefano Battaglia. Following 2011’s The River of Anyder, it was difficult to imagine that the Italian pianist’s trio with bassist Salvator Maiore and drummer Roberto Dani could ever yield a more delicate creation, but with Songways the band has done just that. It is one of the most sensitive jazz experiences available on ECM, rivaling even Tord Gustavsen’s inward glances in scope. Much of that scope has to do with Battaglia, who imbues his compositions with a characteristic wealth of literary allusions.
The album’s title track, in fact, pays homage to the same Calvino fable, and like it tells stories from different perspectives, only to realize that the language and the environments it describes are one and the same. Groovy shadings make it no less contemplative, and Maiore’s archaeological bassing assures that every melodic artifact is polished and museum ready. Maiore, in fact, glows noticeably throughout the album’s dreamiest passages, as those taken through the capital of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput in “Mildendo Wide Song” or the twisted streets of Alfred Kubin’s “Perla.” As much a listener as a speaker, his erosions are so subtle that before you know it a river flows before you.
Battaglia, for his part, stands out in the philosophical (“Armonia,” inspired by Charles Fourier) and the surreal (“Monte Analogo,” from the book by Renée Daumal). Weaving through frames and brushes, he mines every artistic impulse until minerals have been exhausted. With increasing fervor, he paves avenues of abstract impressions. Yet the most rewarding gift of Songways is Dani. Whether brushing through Homer’s Odyssey in “Ismaro” in the wake of Battaglia’s footfalls, evoking the clock of Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional town “Vondervotteimittis” (hats off to engineer Stefano Amerio here for his miking of Dani’s cymbals), or transitioning from hands to sticks in “Babel Hymn,” his feel for tuning is ever on point.
Not only is this a brilliant album and the trio’s most thoughtful work to date; it is an experience that is sure to grow with you. This is jazz as alchemy, turning not lead into gold but gold into song.
(To hear samples of Songways, click here.)
John Cage
As it is
Alexei Lubimov piano, prepared piano
Natalia Pschenitschnikova voice
Recorded December 2011, Radio Studio DRS, Zürich
Engineer: Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher
“turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.”
–e. e. cummings
The music of John Cage has an intimate, if sporadic, history on ECM, where its deepest proponents have been pianists Herbert Henck and Alexei Lubimov. The latter joins soprano Natalia Pschenitschnikova for this collection of early works. Both performers were fearless advocates of Cage in their native Russia at a time when Western music registered peripherally, if at all, on the Soviet radar. Since meeting Cage during the 1988 International Contemporary Music Festival in Leningrad, they have championed his music with a vitality that translates pristinely in the present recording. Here is the portrait of a jovial man who took pleasure in the edible, the empty, in the unpretentious.
The solo piano Dream opens the program with a meditation in the vein of Cage’s In a landscape, only with a more circumscribed palette. It is a painting in miniature, a raking of stones, an attunement to the way things are. It is at once an organic and calculated introduction into a universe dictated not only by chance but also by the hands of musicians, producers, and engineers. One can locate this triangulation elsewhere in Lubimov’s pianism, which infuses the occasional prepared piano piece with bells, pulses, and, somehow, solitude. Both The Unavailable Memory of and Music for Marcel Duchamp are quintessential examples of what the instrument can do, and Lubimov does a fine job showing that it is not a piano augmented but its own entity. Multifarious and adaptive, the music it produces is a dance without bodies.
While the solo repertoire included on this disc moves with the quality of cinematic tracking shots, accepting whatever comes into frame, the introduction of voice slashes the screen so slowly that by the time backlight seeps through, it’s already too late to repair. Cage would surely have welcomed the glow. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake provides the texts for The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, which Pschenitschnikova navigates as though on the verge of tears. As Lubimov hits the piano in microscopic footsteps, words cease to matter and extend tendrils far beyond their semantic shelters. Unlike Cathy Berberian, who gave the piece her lusciously operatic flair, Pschenitschnikova strips her voice bare and finds fresh physicality in its nakedness. Even when singing wordlessly, as in A Flower or She is Asleep, her powers of illustration are no less potent. And when she does elicit meaning from lips and tongue, it is already fragmented. The poetry of e. e. cummings lends itself permeably to Cage’s aesthetic proclivities, and the performers adapt themselves in kind. Pschenitschnikova sings at the back of the room in Experiences No. 2, for example, to beautifully unsettling effect. The programmatic Five Songs (also setting cummings) show the playfulness that was integral to Cage’s character. With such titles as “little four paws” and “Tumbling hair,” they make much of the little things in life that grasp the scarcest rungs of memory. (The final “wheeEEE” of “hist whist” conjures up cummings’s goat-footed balloon man.) Even the Rubik’s cube of Gertrude Stein (Three Songs) becomes transformed in Pschenitschnikova’s affected interpretation. As does Nowth upon nacht, which mines Joyce in a string of single notes and the slam of a piano lid. It’s a gem in the Cage catalogue, one all the more difficult to perform for its brevity and compactness of expression. It hasn’t sounded this vibrant since Joan La Barbara recorded it for New Albion in 1990.
Always comforting about Cage’s music is its attention to inhalation, the storehouse of emotion from which issues his cellular melodies. We can hear this in the Two Pieces for Piano, which together form roots and stem. Like the Dream in variation, which ends the program by redrawing the circle until it becomes a sphere, they wait behind closed eyes for life to begin.
(To hear samples of As it is, click here.)
Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio
Sources
Louis Sclavis bass clarinet, clarinet
Benjamin Moussay piano, Fender Rhodes, keyboards
Gilles Coronado electric guitar
Recorded September 2011, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production
Clarinetist-composer Louis Sclavis continues his journey of self-reinvention on Sources, in trio with keyboardist Benjamin Moussay and guitarist Gilles Coronado. In the album’s press release, Sclavis notes its singularity in his personal oeuvre: “It doesn’t resemble anything else, it’s really music conceived for this group and which couldn’t exist until we played it.” With the exception of the final track, an exploratory groove by Coronado entitled “Sous influences,” the album is comprised of Sclavis originals. While shades of his characteristic edges are detectable, there is indeed something fresh about the textures of what’s being put together there.
The combination of instruments may seem afield of anything else that ECM has produced. And yet, listening to “Près d’Hagondange” and “Dresseur de nuages,” I can’t help but think of Anouar Brahem’s trio work with Jean-Louis Matinier and Françoir Couturier. Despite a marked difference in style, there is affinity of temperament. The spiraling precision of through-composed passages between clarinet and piano gives way to a muscular sort of improvisation that maintains unusual economy of spirit through virtuosity, by which the musicians don’t so much show off as revel in the possibilities of their synergy. The second tune spotlights Moussay on Fender Rhodes, droning beneath Coronado’s circuitry in a postmodern rewiring.
Yet whatever the context, nothing can disguise the sonorous abandon of Sclavis’s bass clarinet, which tears through “La Disparition” as wildly as it beautifies “A Road To Karaganda” with gentler, modal arcs over Moussay’s deeper cartographies (the pianist also excels in “A Migrant’s Day,” for which he toggles between airborne to landlocked movement). Sclavis further enhances the microscopic electronic beat of the title track and evokes river’s flow in “Along The Niger” in a flurry of brushstrokes.
If Sources were a train, it would be balancing on one set of wheels, nearly toppling over but hugging the track at every turn. The trio fuels itself with the sustenance of invention, and with it puffs steam and song without looking back. This is the spiritual successor of Sclavis at his most abstract, a mind shed of its need for fixed identity and all the freer for it.
(To hear samples of Sources, click here.)
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 