Pierre Favre Ensemble: Fleuve (ECM 1977)

| Tyran Grillo

Fleuve

Pierre Favre Ensemble
Fleuve

Philipp Schaufelberger guitar
Frank Kroll soprano saxophone, bass clarinet
Hélène Breschand harp
Michel Godard tuba, serpent
Wolfgang Zwiauer bass guitar
Bänz Oester double-bass
Pierre Favre percussion, drums
Recorded October 2005, Volkshaus Basel
Engineer: Daniel Dettwiler
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A vital current in the European jazz circuit for decades, Pierre Favre gets full spotlight as composer on Fleuve, which finds the Swiss percussionist in the company of a most unusual ensemble that includes two bassists, tuba, harp, reeds, and guitar. The album certainly lives up to its name, which means “river” in French, and accordingly funnels springs and streams into a larger, contrapuntal current.

Although every musician contributes viable color to the Fleuve palette, the alizarin crimson of harpist Hélène Breschand, forest green of bassist Bänz Oester, sky blue of guitarist Philipp Schaufelberger, and the sunlit soprano saxophone of Frank Kroll (also on bass clarinet) add especially noteworthy streaks to the emerging image. Of that image, track titles such as “Mort d’Eurydice” and “Reflet Sud” give us tantalizing hints, reflecting a mythology as personal as it is timeless.

The music is delicately paced, and spins from that core group (with Favre’s adaptive rhythms completing the pentagon) a narrative of elemental conversion. Whether through the spiraling hide and seek of “Panama” or the angled wingspan of “Albatros,” Favre and his bandmates change up combinations, switching above and below, with seamless intuition. One moment might find a theme pouring from the group in tutti, while the next shifts into a duet of guitar and brushed drums, or harp and bass, that strings every melody with care.

Hints of enchantment abound, as in the bass clarinet ambling along the banks of the “Nile” or the medieval song that ghosts the inner sanctum of “Decors.” As throughout the album, gestures abound with glorious promise and find realization through Favre’s orchestral sensitivity.

An album of sense and originality, this is the pinnacle of Favre’s ECM output.

Trio Beyond: Saudades (ECM 1972/73)

| Tyran Grillo

Saudades

Trio Beyond
Saudades

John Scofield guitars
Larry Goldings Hammond organ, electric piano, sampler
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded live November 21, 2004 at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Engineer: Patrick Murray
Edited and mastered at Rainbow Studio by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher

If you can’t stand the heat, then run—don’t walk—into the kitchen. That seems to be the message of Saudades, the unrelenting album by Trio Beyond. The title connotes a longing or melancholy in Portuguese. Yet the music bursts with conviction left and right, so the only thing one might long for is another two discs’ worth. At the heart of Beyond is Jack DeJohnette. His talents have orbited the sun more times than anyone can count, and here he initiates a project in honor of the great Tony Williams, who stepped off the Miles Davis platform in the late sixties to focus on his Lifetime trio, the guitar/organ/drums format of which is preserved here. Even in the absence of this information, the music clearly serves a time when fusion was not yet a sullied word, when its crosspollinations bore fragrances as fresh as spring. In the album’s official press release, DeJohnette humbly notes Williams’s “visionary concept of time and space,” but we can, of course, give similar credit to DeJohnette, a drummer without whom the landscape of modern American music would be much flatter. Fleshing out this homage are two phenomenal musicians in their own right, each with one eye trained to and the other fro. Keyboardist Larry Goldings is magic at the Hammond organ, often playing the parts of bassist and lead with two remarkably independent hands, while guitarist John Scofield fights fire with fire in his blistering yet welcoming style.

Indeed, once Joe Henderson’s “If” lights the match, there’s no turning away from the ensuing glow. Like this set (recorded live at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in late 2004) as a whole, it engages at both the level of performance and through its call to the fortunate listener by way of carefully chosen tunes. Inspiring and inspired, Goldings parallels Scofield’s flame trail like the DeLorean’s tire tracks in Back to the Future. The organist further offers up his original “As One,” which paves a spacy runway into the full (if brief) melodic shout of Larry Young’s “Allah Be Praised.” The title track, first of two cuts by the trio as a unit, proves a fast-moving vehicle for Scofield, who leads the way with staggering variety of tone and control, all the while getting jiggy with increasingly wild electronic enhancements. “Love In Blues,” also by the trio, is no less lovingly crafted, and finds Scofield holding his intense own over a mosaic of rhythms and voices, and finding intensity on his journey toward calm.

Williams’s spirit is apparent throughout, but gets his most overt props as composer of “Pee Wee” and “Emergency.” The first is a relatively tender chunk of goodness in which Scofield plays downright saxophonically, sustaining and clipping notes in kind. The boisterous second is rich as cream sauce—Scofield bringing the rise and Goldings the fall—and scales the cliffs of a spellbinding improvisational mountain. John McLaughlin’s “Spectrum,” given here a 16-minute treatment, is another thoroughly awesome adventure. The nature of DeJohnette and Scofield’s crosstalk, virtuosic yet free to bask in the groove, is a veritable master class of how musicians should listen to each other.

Our requisite ballad comes in the form of “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” by Broadway legend Jule Styne, in which Goldings treads a smooth and sultry line. It’s a soft reprieve after the sharp focus of Miles Davis’s “Seven Steps To Heaven.” DeJohnette steps up his game in a tune filled with propulsive depth and turn-on-a-dime changes, Scofield and Goldings trading expert handoffs all the while. Of course, Miles goes down all the better with a Coltrane chaser. The latter’s “Big Nick” gives more prime time for Goldings, who slingshots past the moon and back. Yet it’s DeJohnette’s perfect timekeeping that lingers longest on the palette, tasting of vibrant life and love for the moment.

Trio Beyond

Arvo Pärt: Lamentate (ECM New Series 1930)

| Tyran Grillo

Lamentate

Arvo Pärt
Lamentate

The Hilliard Ensemble
Sarah Leonard soprano
David James counter-tenor
Rogers Covey-Crump tenor
Steven Harrold tenor
Gordon Jones baritone
Alexei Lubimov piano
SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra
Andrey Boreyko conductor
Lamentate recorded June 2004 at Stadthalle Sindelfingen
Engineers: Dietmar Wolf and Jürgen Buss
Da Pacem Domine recorded April 2005 at Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Tempting as it may be, the typing of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt as a spiritual modernist hardly begins to assess the reach, import, and atmospheric integrity of his music. The more closely one listens to it, the more one hears between every heartbeat an alternating current, whereby shadows take solace in their own orientation of elements. Awareness of this dichotomy throws sanctity over the banal, and lends banality to the sacred, so that by the end of any Pärt listening experience one emerges changed yet profoundly the same—the self made clear under a magnifying glass polished by sound.

And so, while Lamentate may be said to represent a new direction for Pärt, whose music has hardly sounded this visceral since his formative dips into the avant-garde, it also feels like a reflection back to the womb, if only because the composer has so carefully woven into its basketry a conscious structural flaw. Said flaw is the essence of being human. It is what turns the visage of existence firmly away from the realm of fantasy toward the mirror of reality. This “lamento for the living” takes its inspiration from the enormous sculpture “Marsyas” by Anish Kapoor, at the time located in Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern, and anchors a piano soloist (here it is Alexei Lubimov at the keyboard) in an orchestral ocean. In the album’s liner notes, Pärt describes his first encounter with the sculpture: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead—as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present.” Lamentate thus concerns itself with time—or, more precisely, with those who deal with time. The work was premiered at the sculptural site in London on February 7 and 8, 2003, and was recorded for ECM in 2004 at Germany’s Stadthalle Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart.

Before throwing us into these prophetic waters, the disc opens with the prayer for peace that is Da pacem Domine. Composed in 2004 on the basis of a ninth-century Gregorian antiphon and recorded here a year later at St. Gerold monastery near the Austrian mountains, it features the Hilliard Ensemble with soprano Sarah Leonard in a moving, timeless performance (the work reappears in updated form on In Principio). Like much of Pärt’s choral writing, its simplicity is its strength, requiring discipline from interpreters to bring out inner complexities. The antiphon is stretched to reveal a stratum unto itself, a melody to be born into and from. Its lines mark the binding of a book of experiences, the pages of which fade in one direction and become crisper in the other. All, however, bear equal wisdom of the divine hand that inscribed them.

With such pulchritude still warming the chest, Lamentate (2002) comes like a hit in the gut. Each of its ten movements is a monument—now fragile, now menacing—to some emotional shell. These surfaces act as palimpsests for the cellular activities that unspool from a brass incantation. A bass drum rumbles as would the hand of a god trapped beneath the earth’s surface pound for escape. In that frustration are flashes of a life confounded by lifelessness, declarations of dependence wrought in beat and bow. Over the piece’s own lifespan, the recording takes on a wavelength that cracks open intersections of space and time and spins from their yolks an entirely new cosmos. In this parallel universe, the winds are seemingly still yet utterly dynamic like nebulae as fetal kicks javelin fresh thought through a needle of questioning. The piano’s solitude provides the only answer it ever needed to breathe, for in the crafting of flesh lurks a question far beyond our articulation, and to which music nevertheless brings us steps closer. As relays of brass, piano, and percussion give way to whispering tides, echoes of earlier compositions (such as Psalom) make themselves known as a lilting oboe swims against the current. And even the nominal resolution treats alignment like a fantasy, leaving us by the end looking above for any sign of what it means to be below.

Marsyas
(Photo credit: Empics)

Dans les arbres: s/t (ECM 2058)

| Tyran Grillo

Dans les arbres

Dans les arbres

Xavier Charles clarinet, harmonica
Ivar Grydeland acoustic guitar, banjo, sruti box
Christian Wallumrød piano
Ingar Zach percussion, bass drum
Recorded July 2006 at Festiviteten, Eidsvoll, Norway
Engineer: Thomas Hukkelberg, Desibel
Produced by Dans les arbres

Dans les arbres (“In the trees”) is named for the collaboration of clarinetist Xavier Charles, guitarist Ivar Grydeland (who also plays prepared banjo and sruti box), pianist Christian Wallumrød, and percussionist Ingar Zach. Together they illuminate a microscopic diorama of improvisation, letting their inhibitions go in service of the moment. What comes of this is as unknowable as it is unscripted, a mystery that is yet naked before us, hiding nothing—only, we have forgotten its way of speaking.

Immediately striking about this all-acoustic quartet is its seemingly electronic blood flow, nonetheless letted by means unplugged. The feeling comes out in feather-light high tones, which caress the air like a hearing test administered by some distant deity. For much of the album’s duration, listeners are thus suspended at an intersection of thresholds: between motion and stillness, utterance and silence, melody and noise. Each of these is, of course, illusory at best, and this is the album’s greatest lesson.

With one exception—“Le Flegme” (Phlegm)—each movement of Dans les arbres describes a state of mind or being. Titles such as “La Somnolence” (Drowsiness) and “L’Engourdissement” (Numbness) are purely descriptive. They are not pretentious hints toward deeper intrigues, although one can hardly deny the music’s mysterious side effects. If anything, the sounds seem cryptic because of their warping of time. Hence, their pervading suspension. What we hear is what we hear.

The album’s initial stirrings paint a forest fire in its infancy, which sparks unnoticed and by the end reaches such force that it’s too far gone to quell. Nor would we ever think to, for by then the flames have already consumed us. Such dynamics come about through the expertise of the musicians, whose ability to listen to one another is mesmerizing, if only because often the instruments are unrecognizable in their extended play. An obvious piano motif might be overtaken by percussion or overblowing from the clarinet, and those in turn by less discernible soundings. In them is the whispering of the veins. Intimations of rhythm are occasional at best, giving way more often to stretches of aphasia and fitful dreams. As if to put a finer point on it, the self-obliterating prophecy that is “L’Assoupissement” (Slumber) echoes like a mournful gamelan for the inner sanctum.

What holds Dans les arbres together is the fact that every element remains crisply defined, each a key that doesn’t so much unlock as interlock. Whether by way of Wallumrød’s hymnody, Charles’s guttural language, Grydeland’s clicking gears, or Zach’s genetic incantations, the overall transmission comes through with messages intact. Throughout the album’s slow crawl toward the resonating chamber of the sun, where histories of inertia dwell in fantasies of their own design, the insistence of a struck gong or a splitting reed comes like a knock on the door, flowing from itself into itself in a cycle of renewal, residue, and retention.

The only comparison I can offer for reference is Nijiumu’s Era of Sad Wings, which may just be the most enchanting things ever committed to record. Whatever the analogue, this is an unusually beautiful creation from ECM, one well worth the risk of expanding your listening for its benefits.

Tord Gustavsen Trio: Being There (ECM 2017)

| Tyran Grillo

Being There

Tord Gustavsen Trio
Being There

Tord Gustavsen piano
Harald Johnsen double-bass
Jarle Vespestad drums
Recorded December 2006 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There’s no mistaking a Tord Gustavsen Trio record. Intimate in measure yet profound in scope, each builds on the last like another level of a pyramid built from the capstone down. In this manner Being There follows Changing Places and The Ground as the last of a trilogy, though it is by no means the be all and end all of the trio’s capabilities. There’s so much to admire on Being There that one could see its vessel off contentedly were it never to return to shore. If the album’s title sounds familiar, that’s because it comes by way of a tune off The Ground. But this baker’s dozen casts two forward glances for every backward, always moving toward the goal of utter respect: for the notecraft, for the sound, for the moment.

Those who subscribe to the stereotype of contemplative Nordic jazz will be both rewarded and pleasantly surprised. On the one hand, there is “At Home,” which begins the album, as it has often done for the trio’s stage sets, with honed lyric intensity and lullaby charm. The brushed ruminations of Gustavsen’s bandmates—bassist Harald Johnsen and drummer Jarle Vespestad—buoy the pianist on inky currents. The downtempo mood holds true for much of the album’s hymnody, taking fullest (which is to say, spacious) form in the anthemic “Still There” and the veiled “Vesper.” With barest touch but also viable emotional weight, the trio moves further through the balladic changes of “Around You” and “Draw Near” with an embrace so warm that three become one. Each is a profession of faith in love through love of faith, drifting a hair’s breadth from the divine in “Sani.” This duet for piano and drums describes a blown feather. Free of wing in its own dream of flight, it wanders along a quiet storm’s path. These slower songs take full advantage of the acoustics, both live and post-processed, and build to a density of expression that nevertheless allows room to breathe. It’s as if the trio explores knots in wood, each a galaxy waiting to be sung. In them Gustavsen paints flowering worlds with every keystroke, as he does especially in the melodic orbit of “Karmosin” (penned by Johnsen and the only track not by the pianist) and the solo improvised “Interlude.” The latter is the modal hip at which the album flexes. Poetry flows from its deference, clear as sunlight on a river, across a brittle page, which is then folded, sealed, and held above a burning candle.

While much of the album is suited to closed-eye listening, there are a few breaks in the waves. Between the swooping wingspan of “Vicar Street” and the uplifting “Where We Went,” there is “Blessed Feet,” a masterful and obvious nod to Keith Jarrett. This swinging number proves Gustavsen a magician at the keyboard, by which he, ever the melodic herdsman, corrals every note in formation. Even the lethargic clouds of “Cocoon” abide by structural principles, at once conscious and free.

Yet it is on the waters of “Wide Open” that the trio finds what it’s been looking for: a step into the future, as yet unknown, with eyes fixed on the horizon. Where the album opened at home, here it ends with a homecoming. And it is in your home that this music belongs, right there on the shelf next to your most prized discs.

Monika Mauch/Nigel North: Musical Banquet (ECM New Series 1938)

| Tyran Grillo

Musical Banquet

Musical Banquet

Monika Mauch soprano
Nigel North lute
Recorded May 2005, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Named for an anthology of lute songs compiled in 1610 by Robert Dowland (1586-1641), son of John (1563-1626), Musical Banquet offers up exactly that. Lutenist Nigel North joins soprano Monika Mauch in an expert dovetailing of musicality, detail, and, above all, emotive power. Performing such songs is no small task. The separation of lutenist from the voice that must once have issued from the same—the result of a long recital tradition—means that singer and accompanist must balance poetry and setting with poise. One hears both throughout this spaciously engineered recording, which is to say that Mauch and North bring the precise intonation of classical rigor in harmony with the raw affect of the words.

To that end, Mauch’s diction is so crisp and finely scored that, were one to snap it anywhere, it would break off in cleanest lines. Whether bound by the tenderness of “Passava Amor su arco desarmado” (Love walked by unarmed) or freed by the self-pity of “Far from triumphing court,” respectively the program’s opening and closing songs, Mauch navigates a veritable maze of lovelorn dimensions with gorgeous uplift. North’s cogent luting is equally alluring, a pleasure to behold in its adaptive variety. Between their covers flip beautiful pages—some tattered, others gilded—dripping with sentiment.

In addition to French and English songs, the repertoire includes more from Italy by Giulio Caccini (1551-1618), as well as a handful of anonymous examples from Spain. Each stream has its own quality. The French songs are like necklaces, beads held true by strings of regard. The English, especially those by Father Dowland (Robert avoided inclusion of his own), weave contradictory tapestries. The lyrics might at one moment invite with a flirtatious lilt (“Lady, if you so spite me”), while at the next steep the narrative voice in claustrophobia. In the latter vein, consider your ears fortunate should you ever encounter a more heartrending rendition of his timeless “In darkness let me dwell.”

As for the Italian, and especially the ever-popular “Amarilli mia bella” (My fair Amaryllis), they tend to favor brevity, exerting all the more inertia for it. The Spanish encompass Mauch’s depth of range, making full use of her dynamic control. Furthermore, they challenge North to maintain intrigue by switching one backdrop after another in a gallery of rhythms and styles. Such colors nuance every mystery behind the words. Throughout them all, a peppering of lute solos by John Dowland is the glue that binds. Each is a gorgeous, multifaceted thing, carved with the geometrical precision of a Celtic knot.

Not only is the music of this collection brimming with allure; it also comes to us by the art of two peerless early music interpreters. Mauch’s singing combines the innocence of an Emma Kirkby with the passion of an Arianna Savall into something uniquely her own. North, for his part, looks longingly in the mirror and draws messages from the past. All it requires is a cadence or snatch of melody, and our hand has already been taken, led through a landscape where bodies once danced before they were buried to nourish the trees that to this day grow in their place.

Steve Tibbetts: Natural Causes (ECM 1951)

| Tyran Grillo

Natural Causes

Steve Tibbetts
Natural Causes

Steve Tibbetts guitars, piano, kalimba, bouzouki
Marc Anderson percussion, steel drum, gongs
Recorded 2008 in St. Paul
Engineer: Steve Tibbetts
An ECM Production

If ever there was a case for quality over quantity, Steve Tibbetts is it. A full eight years after A Man About A Horse, the Minnesotan guitarist returns with his most intimate statement yet. Alongside percussionist Marc Anderson, collaborator of over three decades, Tibbetts crafts a geography so inward-looking that it becomes a parallel world. Tibbetts originally flirted with the idea of releasing Natural Causes as one single track. Were such the case, listeners would feel no less aware of its science. Either way, its 13 tracks are not variations on a theme, even if they do play with the theme of variation. He calls them, rather, “complex little cathedrals,” building them as he does stone by stone, if not string by string. Indeed, his trusted 12-string guitar is possessed of something divine, its frets pared down to almost nothing over years of playing, so that fingers glide freely.

In a rare turn, Natural Causes is nearly all acoustic and accordingly finds Tibbetts playing piano, kalimba, and bouzouki to flesh out the palette. In addition to these, he employs a midi interface, by which he triggers samples of gongs and metal-key instruments collected during his travels. Of these, “Lakshmivana” is the fullest integration of plugged and unplugged. Told in the language of prayer—i.e., of human artifice embracing sacrality—it is an astonishing meditation that is only deepened by the story told in “Chandogra.” Here the periphery is barely noticeable. Instruments peek from the shadows, seemingly incidental, and fade at the instant of regard.

From the back-porch motif that introduces “Sitavana,” the album’s gateway, and through the burgeoning field that follows toward the solo “Threnody,” it’s obvious that Tibbetts’s attention to detail has grown like the preceding metaphor. His playing, mellifluous as ever, establishes global reach with tracks like “Padre-Yaga,” in which Anderson’s hand drumming leaves trails on the beaten plains. It develops, as does the album as a whole, in distinct cells, every pause linking the body to the less tangible impulses that make fingers ache for the fretboard.

There is an almost keening quality to Tibbetts’s portamento. “Attahasa,” for one, is a tree shedding spores. For another, “Sangchen Rolpa” wavers on the precipice of some great abyss. Across that expanse Tibbetts extends brief, tender bridges, paved with inner fire. Between them, the album’s groundswells reveal texture and breadth.

Although this is Tibbetts’s most inward-looking record, it is also his farthest reaching. His art is as honest as the landscapes that inform it, changing form and color as he moves from one riverbank to the next. Whether you choose to walk with him or listen upon him from above, just know there is a home for you here to which you may always return.

Stefano Battaglia: Raccolto (ECM 1933/34)

| Tyran Grillo

Raccolto

Stefano Battaglia
Raccolto

Stefano Battaglia piano
Giovanni Maier double bass
Michele Rabbia percussion
Dominique Pifarély violin
Recorded September/December 2003, Artesuono Recording Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Album produced by ECM

Raccolto is one of ECM’s most fascinating productions, though for some listeners surely also one of its most challenging. Significant enough for welcoming Italian pianist Stefano Battaglia to the label, it may be equally so for introducing percussionist Michele Rabbia, whose contributions are nothing short of revelatory throughout this double-disc effort. Battaglia and Rabbia are the common links to the album’s back-to-back trios, the first with bassist Giovanni Maier (better known as Triosonic) and the second with violinist Dominique Pifarély (a.k.a. Atem).

The standard jazz trio here is anything but in execution, as evidenced by the title track (meaning “harvest”), which opens the first session with Battaglia’s careful footsteps, joined by others in a dimly lit hall of mirrors. Striking here, aside from the rhythm section’s awakenings, are the Bach-like changes at play. It is as if the ensuing theatre of abstractions issues from the heart of history. With names like “All is language” and “In front of the fourth door,” it’s easy to get lost in each track’s spell, under which certainties become uncertainties and uncertainties become mantras. Motives seek rupture but find only a scrim of caution between them and full-on embodiment. And so, they dream of that embodiment instead, and this is the sound to which we are made privy, especially in the brief, and sometimes astonishing, culminations scattered throughout. Rhythms are thus implied more than they are directed, caught in virtuosic blips from the man at the keys or from Rabbia’s dustings of shrapnel and time. In these examples, as in “Our circular song,” the percussionist reveals worlds unto himself.

Not to be left behind, Maier grabs a lion’s share of spotlight in “L’osservanza,” which concludes the set in a vehicle of tender, lyric flashes. It’s a billowing weave that cups wind as a flower would sunlight. The bassist’s soloing in “Triangolazioni” adds depth to whispers and occupies a poetic center. He further inspires Battaglia to crystalline segues of call and response. “Coro,” then, can be nothing but a maze. Rabbia adds to it insect wings, hushes of children and slumber, of hiding and protection, so that Battaglia’s chording can find consummation only within. Hence, too, the two tracks marked “Triosonic,” in which the piano gives up its ghosts so that others might live.

Disc 2 swaps Maier for Pifarély for a dozen classically inflected improvisations built around abstract themes. As the go-to violinist of Louis Sclavis, Pifarély should surprise no one familiar with the violinist’s selective chamber appearances, each a window into another. His slippery playing recalls Luciano Berio’s Voci, especially in the folkish lilt of “Lys” and in the two “Cantos.” The latter feature prepared piano for a glassine effect, while Rabbia dips into more metallic streams of consciousness. And then, there is the obvious homage, “Recitativo in memoria di Luciano Berio,” which finds the trio mining the Italian landscape for ideas.

Surrounding moods range from frenetic to elegiac, achieving soul-digging brilliance in “Riconoscenza,” “Velario de marzo,” and “Pourquoi?” The last is tempered by Pifarély’s gravelly soothsaying in a showing of perfect restraint. Through various geometric configurations, the three musicians follow string paths as blood navigates veins until they reach the resonant frequency of “…Dulci declinant lumina somno…” It is the unforeseen view underlying everything, a vista within a vista, fragile as a moth’s wing.

It’s only appropriate that Battaglia should have found a home at ECM. The pianist cites Paul Bley’s Open, To Love and Keith Jarrett’s Facing You as defining encounters that pushed his classical rigor into dovetailed paths of improvisatory possibility. His Raccolto is one stubborn staircase, indeed, but well worth the climb. A debut to remember.