ECM Records

Enzo Favata: Ritornare (ECM 2883)

| Tyran Grillo

Enzo Favata
Ritornare

Enzo Favata soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Marcello Peghin ten-string guitar
Salvatore Maltana double bass
U.T. Gandhi drums
Recorded January 2026
Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

Every return contains a betrayal. The place may remain where it was, yet the person approaching has been revised by distance, while memory has moved the streets. On Ritornare, Enzo Favata treats return as imaginative recovery that transforms whatever it retrieves. Music carries landscape within experience, with literature serving as a compass across waters whose histories mingle beneath imposed names. The title points backward, though the album keeps opening forward. Home survives as an activity of attention and belonging that has quietly learned a foreign language in one’s absence.

Favata has long listened for submerged connections. Born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1956, the saxophonist and clarinetist developed a musical language shaped by his native island, then widened it through the greater Mediterranean and distant shores. Atlantico, formed in 1999, gathered impressions during South American travels while attending to African inheritances across the ocean. “Tukuman” makes this migratory history palpable. Brushed drums and double bass establish a softly revolving ground, soon deepened by Daniel di Bonaventura’s bandoneón. Marcello Peghin’s guitar rises through it, and Favata’s soprano traces the theme in lucid arcs. The tune begins in transit, already pondering somewhere beyond its horizon.

Such movement never requires Atlantico to surrender its center. Favata and Peghin share decades of collaboration rooted in southern Italy, while bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi join di Bonaventura in a collective whose music expands without compromising its infrastructure. On the above-mentioned “Tukuman,” Favata dances through sudden turns as di Bonaventura weaves through a zoetrope of half-recovered scenes. A locomotive pulse gathers below the surface; elsewhere, the ensemble skims forward on the tensile calm of open water. Their travel is purposeful without submitting to destination, driven by the joy of motion itself.

The album’s journeys are as much literary as they are musical. Favata has recognized portions of his imaginative territory in Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, whose visible worlds admit secret laws. Gabriel García Márquez occupies another canopy in this forest of affinities. Favata describes Atlantico’s music as suspended between dream and reality, and “El Sur” dwells within that tension. Its melody seems to have waited inside the listener for years, requiring these musicians to pronounce it. Favata’s soprano carries a warm tone through each key change, altering its shape as the harmony breaks into tessellated color. No player merely accompanies another. The music passes among them as collective evidence from a dream whose witnesses recall different aspects of the same event.

That equality of attention gives the album much of its emotional authority. “Escuchame” brings Favata’s clarinet forward with grave tenderness, carrying a winding theme that seems to hold dust in its mouth and an old key beneath its tongue. Gandhi places minute percussive touches around it, while Maltana’s bass turns through the harmony with unforced intelligence. Di Bonaventura and Peghin shelter the theme without enclosing it. The performance reveals an ethical awareness in which each voice makes space for another to become more fully itself. Such intimacy rises from years spent hearing the fraction of a second before a friend decides where to place a note.

The quintet’s history therefore enters the recording as an invisible player. In “Donde nace el viento,” Peghin’s delicate strumming draws reverie into three dimensions, each chord swaying above an imagined Mediterranean courtyard. Favata’s soprano gives the moving air a throat, while marine salt flavors every unspoken word with distant relatives and childhoods spent along the shore. Recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in January 2026 with Manfred Eicher producing, Ritornare is Favata’s first album for ECM and Atlantico’s most finely illuminated acoustic statement. Eicher allows silence to acquire mass while every tone retains its contour. Sardinia remains audible beneath the compositions, and other continents move within their rhythmic memory as currents rather than destinations.

This spacious acoustic world carries echoes of classic ECM sessions without collapsing into homage. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti can be sensed in its meeting of lyricism and space. John Surman occupies a nearby constellation, his shadow passing across the low reeds. “Sine nomine” opens a cinematic chamber where Dino Saluzzi’s tenderness meets the patient visual imagination associated with Theo Angelopoulos. Yet influence behaves as nourishment rather than costume. Associations surface and blur into Atlantico’s own language, one assembled from human contact and therefore resistant to distillation. The composition’s title, therefore, feels apt. It moves through identities without accepting permanent residence in any of them, leaving an outline that the mind continues to fill with speculation.

“Milonga del Sol” extends that cinematic feeling through a haunted dance, holding sweetness near an ache it never attempts to cure. Eleni Karaindrou’s bittersweet gravity hovers at the edge, then Favata veers into improvisational flight and loosens the reference’s claim. His phrases persuade gravity to reconsider its loyalties while the band maintains an exquisite balance between ritual and surprise. Di Bonaventura compresses whole lifetimes of longing into the bellows, and Peghin answers with translucent chords. Gandhi and Maltana keep the dance moving from centuries beneath their feet.

Such ambiguity gives Ritornare its peculiar attraction. The music recognizes places the listener has never visited, awakening the impression of a past that belongs to no single lineage. “Ventana” sharpens that paradox through an unprecedented view of a landscape already seen through other eyes. Its window also examines the act of looking, the secret appetite through which attention changes its object. Favata frames the view, then disrupts it, before the ensemble follows him into a terrain where recognition morphs into estrangement. Familiar materials are angled until their concealed surfaces catch the light. The piece asks how long a life can contain beauty before the mind finally notices, leaving a window open inside the question and the observer exposed to an answering gaze.

“Albatros” gathers the album’s virtues into a final statement of astonishing restraint. The tender throatiness of bass clarinet gives the piece an earthbound gait that brightens from within. When the soprano opens above it, the instrument spreads a wing across the morning and calls toward the sea, a prayer for the hidden catch to rise. The ensemble avoids spectacle, allowing desire to lose its dominion in favor of something selfless. Impeccably performed and recorded, Ritornare contains some of the most enduring melodies to emerge from a Manfred Eicher production in recent years, making it a persuasive contender for ECM album of the year. Its deeper triumph resists ranking. Perhaps the self is only the harbor’s temporary arrangement of ropes and salt-worn voices, held together long enough for one vessel to recognize another. Far beneath that exchange, the drowned map turns over in its sleep, and every border drawn upon it opens a patient ear.

Andy Sheppard: Salt Catchers (ECM 2856)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Sheppard
Salt Catchers

Andy Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones
Rita Marcotulli piano
Michel Benita double bass
Recorded March 2025, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 11, 2026

Across six ECM releases, Andy Sheppard has treated ensemble form as an instrument in and of itself, altering the ambient details around his reeds so each setting reveals a different nuance of his breath. The quintet on Movements in Colour surrounded him with shifting densities, Trio Libero pursued more intense conversation, and his quartet with Eivind Aarset opened electronic passageways through acoustic terrain. Most enduringly, the trio with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow placed his lyricism inside a world where wit could hold hands with pathos.

Salt Catchers begins another chapter, bringing the English saxophonist together with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita for the first time as a unit. Their cohesion suggests that certain ensembles exist before they are convened, awaiting only the studio in which their latent testimony can be documented. The drummerless format retains a trace of Sheppard’s years with Bley, whose “Lawns” is the sole nonoriginal among nine pieces, yet memory is a hidden foundation rather than a governing premise.

Most of the album was written during the pandemic, as Sheppard moved from the guitar-centered environments of earlier projects toward chamber music’s concentrated intimacy. Marcotulli opens fissures within composed material, while Benita touches the folkloric roots of Sheppard’s writing without disturbing the earth around them.

A Portuguese shadow passes through Salt Catchers. Now living near Lisbon, Sheppard draws on the gravity of saudade, allowing longing to organize melodies that function as complete emotional bodies rather than maps for improvisation. Their romanticism carries something of John Martyn, absorbed so thoroughly that its source has become molecular. Recorded in Lugano in March 2025 under Manfred Eicher’s direction, the album gathers geography and recollection into a deceptively calm surface, demanding that every note justify the silence it displaces.

“Elevation” establishes this economy with piano that raises a transparent structure around the listener. Sheppard’s tenor enters above its own shadow, offering a melody whose openness contains the ache of distance, while Benita traces the invisible contours that keep it suspended. An echo of Charles Lloyd inhabits Sheppard’s spacious tone, though time may be the deeper influence: decades of listening move through his sound as sediment, leaving the line clear as the past gathers beneath it.

Where “Elevation” offers a horizon, “Lawns” provides an address. Bley’s composition flowers into a suburban psalm, its chords carrying the holiness of ordinary refuge. Marcotulli’s phrases hold survival and repose within the same circumference, as Sheppard’s breath-softened lower register gives the melody human grain and Benita places each note with tender exactitude. With each iteration, the harmony resembles a childhood house whose rooms change dimensions whenever one tries to enter.

The title track begins beneath the keyboard’s conventional surface. Reaching into dampened piano strings, Marcotulli releases metallic murmurs and half-born harmonics. Sheppard’s soprano evokes salt as residue and preservative, the crystal in which an evaporated sea continues thinking. When the musicians reach the concluding unison, three private trajectories have discovered a single edge.

The Portuguese current nears the surface in “Encantos,” whose buoyancy gives Sheppard’s melody an unforced radiance. Enchantment survives through partial concealment: the tune gives itself freely while keeping a central chamber locked. Later, “Salgado” answers with understated montuno inflections and geometric harmonizations.

“Draw You In Stars” opens with a luminous piano arpeggio, a spiral staircase whose destination recedes as it rises. Sheppard’s tenor exposes a vulnerable grain before he and piano meet, then part for Benita’s restrained, quick-minded solo. Marcotulli moves farther from the harmonic center, seeking a truth faithful to instability.

Marcotulli opens “This Too – Three Hills” like a book at an unknown page, and Sheppard enters carrying the next sentence in his breath. The hills become folds in memory, elevations made by all the mind has buried unevenly. As the playing dissolves into breath and pause, each phrase embraces uncertainty instead of converting it into drama.

Absence takes intimate form in “Those That Left.” Piano and bass communicate across a missing center, exchanging signals whose tenderness derives from what they decline to resolve. Marcotulli’s dream logic brings light to grief’s edges without making loss decorative. “Irene” then gathers bass and soprano into a supple dance before piano widens the emotional field. Elegant without sweetness, it draws darkness inside radiance, knowing beauty does not cancel sorrow but grants it another form of circulation.

Marcotulli is the session’s revelation, turning modest gestures into portals through which whole emotional cartographies appear. She does not decorate the music; she alters its physics. Benita gives every contour a quiet gravitational center, allowing Sheppard’s melodies to travel without losing human proportion.

The title contains the key. Salt preserves by entering what it preserves, becoming inseparable from the body it protects. These musicians practice a related attention: each voice receives the others deeply enough to be changed, yet no identity dissolves. Listening becomes a willingness to let another person’s silence speak for itself. Perhaps civilization begins there, in the discipline required to let another person’s unfinished phrase live.

Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still (ECM New Series 2801)

| Tyran Grillo

Samuel Beckett
Trevor Bača
Stirrings Still

Paul Griffiths narrator
JACK Quartet
Christopher Otto violin
Austin Wulliman violin
John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell violoncello
Recorded 2023 and 2024, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineers: Michael Rast, Lara Persia, and Michael Hinreiner (mix)
Cover photo: Rosemarie Clausen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 4, 2026

Completed in 1987 and first published the following year, Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, a dispatch from that uncertain border where the voice survives even as the self begins to lose its outline. More monologue than story, it finds an unnamed man whose passage may lead through a vast wheatfield drained into black and white, or deeper into the stumbling grain of memory itself. The distinction gradually ceases to matter. Life and what lies beyond become double exposures on the same strip of film, each haunting the other with the possibility that consciousness is merely the afterimage cast by its own disappearance.

Beckett cherished music, especially the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert, whose melodies often travel farthest just they seem to be coming back home. Something of that impossible homecoming inhabits Beckett’s prose. His sentences circle their subjects until repetition becomes a form of erosion, each recurrence touching the old wound from another angle. Phrases withdraw before reappearing with their centers of gravity subtly displaced. Meaning flickers among them, less an object to be grasped than a disturbance of breath registered in passing. Stirrings Still is therefore already a kind of chamber work, its developments tightening toward the point where language encounters the silence it has carried within itself all along.

Paul Griffiths’s relationship with this world reaches back more than half a century. His first encounter with Beckett arrived at a decisive age, when the boundary between art and life can still vanish without warning. “A student production of Waiting for Godot was put on at the Oxford Playhouse in November 1965,” he recounts to me via email. “I was in my first term as an undergraduate and had just turned eighteen. It changed my life. Little by little (I was living on a student grant) I bought pretty much everything of Beckett’s that was in print.” That formative shock and stretching of personal resources can be felt in his narration of Stirrings Still. Griffiths does not approach the text as a monument to be admired from a respectful distance. He speaks from within a lifelong proximity, as though the words have accompanied him for so long that they now belong to his private scaffolding. Such familiarity allows him to resist theatrical enlargement. Every hesitation carries its own weight, and each repetition sounds newly discovered in the mouth.

The recording also belongs to producer Manfred Eicher’s longstanding conversation with literature, a dimension of his work sometimes eclipsed by the attention given to his cinematic imagination. Griffiths places the project within a history extending to the origins of ECM New Series: “Spoken-voice recordings were part of the New Series from the beginning, and they trace some part of Manfred Eicher’s literary world, which he also partly shares with some of the musicians he’s worked with—Heiner Goebbels, for example, and Kurtág.” Literature, in this context, forms part of the label’s underlying sensibility, shaping its understanding of voice and the charged intervals surrounding utterance. Eicher’s ear has always extended toward those places where one art begins to think through the materials of another.

The path to this particular convergence was itself Beckettian in its patience. In 2006, Eicher asked Griffiths to seek out a composer capable of writing music that could exist in the closest possible sympathy with a recording of the text, preserving its austere sovereignty while answering its inner music. A decade passed. Then, hearing the JACK Quartet rehearse Trevor Bača’s Akasha at Harvard in 2016, Griffiths recognized that the search had been listening for its own answer. Asked what in Bača’s work provoked that recognition, Griffiths answers with characteristic directness: “Not much more to say about the genesis. To answer in one word: intimacy. His music speaks intimately and is made intimately, down to the finest nuance. Also, of course, the string quartet was the obvious ensemble, and I felt this was music that could withstand and deal with the huge presence of Beckett.”

That final phrase identifies the central danger of the undertaking. Beckett’s presence is indeed huge, despite the spareness of the material. And so, any musical candle lit in its shadow could easily become decorative or subservient, reducing itself to atmospheric confirmation of meanings the prose has already supplied. Bača declines the obedient servitude of accompaniment. His score runs beside the words as a parallel stream with its own depth and darkness, neither illustrating the text nor competing for possession of it. Heard in alternation with Griffiths’s narration, the JACK Quartet enters as another order of consciousness, contemplating Beckett from beyond the reach of speech. The strings draw the listener beneath the semantic surface, into the undertow where words continue to exert their pull after their immediate impact has loosened its grip. Griffiths gives the narrator a voice worn almost to the grain, while Bača opens chambers around it in which solitude can resonate beyond the dimensions of the solitary.

What emerges is a work suspended between articulation and subversion thereof, each dynamic carrying what the other must relinquish. Bača’s finest gestures seem microscopically fashioned, alive to the pressure of bow hair and the tremor released when one surface encounters another. Within these sounds lies a physical knowledge that language can approach but never quite retain. Something continues on the far side of saying, faintly stirring in the dust from which every word is born and to which every word returns.

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.” Thus begins the world into which we are introduced, accompanied by nearly mournful scrapings from the strings. They touch resonantly upon a premonition of death, though the narrator is granted no consoling return to whatever enchanted him as a child. The circumstance of living forces him instead toward the limits of what can be known. A window remains locked because opening it would expose more than the mind can bear. He is left to imagine a form of intercorporeal travel in which light acquires qualities beyond day and night, while the vagaries of experience fall as rain upon drought-stricken earth.

From this threshold come the most delicate tremblings, poised at the edge of audibility, where mortal questions cease to be asked because the answers must also die if they are to be genuinely felt. Those haunting fringes of strings and fretless fingerboards provide a passage for the ghosts of implication. An insectile agitation enters the instruments, suggestive of animal life. The sound seems to remember some primordial condition before flesh and thought became convinced of their separation. Bača allows timbre to retain that ancient uncertainty. A scrape may be the distress of wood under pressure, yet it also carries the sensation of a body trying to hear beyond itself.

As the narrator, poised between tenderness and robust resignation, continues to riff on the fragility of his own existence, the music reveals a premonitional character rather than a commentative one. Siren-toned descents foreshadow the broken heart of solitude, and whisper-quiet stirrings release the title from abstraction. Appearances and disappearances implicate us in their zoetrope, each open slit a death, with the moment beyond it offering another life begun. Creakings suggest the internal groaning of bone on bone, the expression of a body in retrograde. Flinching angels exchange glances with lock-staring demons in a currency of dangerously intimate proportions, always returning to center before resuming their games of perception.

Once the framework of self-awareness begins to lose its structural integrity, the strings grow more animate. They tremble in real time at the realization that something deeper than vibrational frequency is at play, an almost instantaneous relativity that flies straight into the heart of grief. Every bow stroke appears to alter the temporal pressure around Griffiths’s voice. The quartet does not surround the speaker so much as expose the detachments already contained within him. His pauses widen into territories, and the score crosses them without pretending to know what waits on the opposite side.

Beckett’s alter ego is always seeking a way, only to discover that every doorway leads further back in. A quivering harmonic becomes another slipstream into the flowering mind, where wilting and blooming remain equally present. Through a harshly beautiful economy of language, what appears bare on the page acquires in discourse a richness of observation about the human condition. Impulses scrabble in the walls of the subconscious, evading the reach of neurological fingers before falling into the hands of the very soul they describe with unabashed honesty. Griffiths follows these movements without imposing an emotional map upon them. The tenderness of his reading comes from acknowledging how little tenderness the universe itself appears obliged to provide.

Bača’s attention to detail occasionally touches the borderlands explored by George Crumb, another composer drawn toward language at its margins. Yet Bača occupies this territory with a privacy distinctly his own. He listens into the spaces between words, where the tail of one utterance curves toward the head of another in a continuous rotation of exhalation and inhalation. Within the interval separating those breaths, the self becomes perceptible as a rhythm rather than a stable possession. The bow reverses direction while sustaining the illusion of a single note, and consciousness performs an equivalent maneuver, repeatedly changing course while calling the result continuity.

The deepest achievement of this recording may lie in how thoroughly it dissolves any secure division between the witness and the witnessed. The man sees himself rise from the table, Griffiths gives breath to the man, and the quartet listens to that breath from a region his monologue cannot enter. We receive each layer as we add another through the act of attention. Perception becomes a relay conducted across bodies that can never meet, yet briefly inhabit the same uncertainty.

Perhaps the unnamed man is therefore doing more than approaching extinction. In watching himself depart, he invents the witness who might survive him. Beckett entrusted that witness to language, Griffiths lends it mortal breath, and Bača places it within the vulnerable substance of sound. We inherit the man’s vigil without acquiring his identity. For a little while, his consciousness passes through ours, asking for neither rescue nor remembrance. It reveals something more unsettling: that the self may be only the temporary custody of an awareness forever arriving from elsewhere. Our lives are shaped by the voices we shelter, most of whom will never know our names. In this sense, consciousness has always been on loan, and listening is the obscure means by which we return it like a library book we checked out and forgot about long ago.

The Outflung Net

| Tyran Grillo

Issued in Germany in 1992, The Outflung Net is a rare six-LP box whose very lack of a conventional catalog number suits its elusive character. The title comes from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, where a fly cast spreads so widely that it seems to have “a center wherever you look.” That image is an ideal emblem for this gathering of ECM New Series recordings. Arvo Pärt may supply its spiritual center, but every disc becomes a center in turn, each extending a line toward Bach, modernism, improvisation, ritual, and the fertile silence for which producer Manfred Eicher’s label had become known. More than a sampler, the set is a compact aesthetic manifesto.

Pärt’s Miserere (ECM 1430) is its natural threshold. The Hilliard Ensemble under Paul Hillier, soprano Sarah Leonard, organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, percussionist Pierre Favre, the Western Wind Chamber Choir, and the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn under Dennis Russell Davies inhabit music whose power lies in the tension between utterance and suspension. In the title work, Psalm 51 advances almost word by word, clarinet responses turning language into dialogue. The “Dies irae” erupts like a storm at the end of the world, yet the performance never mistakes volume for grandeur. Leonard’s ascents, David James’s countertenor radiance, Gordon Jones’s grave baritone, and the Hilliards’ collective purity lead from devastation toward an order glimpsed rather than possessed. Festina Lente spirals with stately paradox, while Sarah Was Ninety Years Old sets voices, organ, and Favre’s drums inside an austere arithmetic of awe. Few recordings make interrupted thought feel so complete.

Two albums by Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga place Bach beside living modernism, not as opposing camps but as mutually illuminating practices. On Bach/Holliger (ECM 1340), he is joined by violinist Catrin Demenga and oboist-composer Heinz Holliger. The latter’s Duo trembles and darts with sibling precision, his Studie über Mehrklänge turns circular breathing and multiphonics into a strangely lyrical anatomy of the oboe, and Trema makes the cello shiver as if pursued by its own shadow. After such exposed nerves, Bach’s Fourth Cello Suite arrives cleansed of familiarity. Demenga plays without decorative vanity, drawing a dark inward song from the Sarabande and allowing every fingerfall and resonance to enter the recording’s crystalline air.

Bach/Carter (ECM 1391) reverses the route, opening with the Third Cello Suite in a performance of warmth, mobility, and improvisatory lift before stepping into Elliott Carter’s quicksilver world. Demenga is joined by flutist Philippe Racine, clarinetist Ernesto Molinari, violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger, pianist Paul Cleemann, percussionist Gerhard Huber, and conductor Jürg Wyttenbach. Esprit rude, Esprit doux, Enchanted Preludes, and Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi sketch compressed dramas of interruption and pursuit, but the Triple Duo is the summit: three instrumental pairs exchange ideas with the precarious grace of an intoxicated gymnast. Carter’s simultaneities can seem like scattered strata until time reveals their underlying geology. Heard after Bach, their density is not disorder but another species of counterpoint.

Gavin Bryars’s After the Requiem (ECM 1424) supplies the box’s most openly elegiac landscapes. Its title piece, written as an instrumental afterimage of the Cadman Requiem, brings Bill Frisell’s electric guitar together with the violas of Alexander Balanescu and Kate Musker and Tony Hinnigan’s cello. Frisell burns slowly through the strings like northern light, his sustained tones less a solo voice than a spirit learning the texture of mourning. Elsewhere, Balanescu, clarinetist Roger Heaton, pianist Dave Smith, Bryars on bass, and percussionists Martin Allen and Simon Limbrick navigate The Old Tower of Löbenicht and Allegrasco, while Evan Parker, Stan Sulzmann, Ray Warleigh, and Julian Argüelles form the saxophone choir of Alaric I or II. Bells, low reeds, spare ostinatos, and corroded melodies make the album feel antique without imitation.

The set then widens beyond the concert-hall frame. Trommelgeflüster (ECM 1249) is Harald Weiss alone on percussion and voice, though “alone” hardly describes its populous theater. Steel-toned steps, melismatic chants, whistles, outbursts, and distant twangs gather into a ritual that continually questions its own regularity. Weiss’s theatrical and intercultural imagination risks pastiche, yet the music’s physical conviction pulls its materials into one breathing organism. Part I moves as if across sun-struck earth before Part II enters darker, more dreamlike territory. The title means “Drum Whisper,” but the album whispers with an entire body.

Walter Fähndrich’s Viola (ECM 1412) closes the collection by reducing the field to a single instrument and opening it onto uncertainty. A composer, improviser, and sound-installation artist, Fähndrich gives his pieces only Roman numerals. Overtones sway, rapid arpeggios climb into spirals, sul tasto passages ring like buried bells, and scratches become avian calls and insect song. His precisely governed bow does not tame these sounds so much as release their inner ecology. The final, expanded return to “IV” refuses neat circularity, leaving the ear at the threshold of another possible performance.

Across these six records, ECM’s celebrated spaciousness is never merely atmospheric. Pärt’s prayer, Bach’s architecture, Holliger’s fractured breath, Carter’s restless syntax, Bryars’s weathered remembrance, Weiss’s embodied ritual, and Fähndrich’s improvisational earth all belong to the same outflung net. Its center is everywhere because attentive listening keeps moving it. Rare as an object and even rarer in the coherence of its vision, this box preserves a moment when New Series seemed less like a label imprint than a new way of organizing musical time.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this collection to my attention.

ECM New Series Collection 1995

| Tyran Grillo

Released in Germany as a promotional anthology, ECM New Series Collection 1995 gathers 26 passages from a fertile landscape. Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM New Series 1570) lays out a path of travel before us with two themes whose cinematic origin loosens into a larger psychic terrain. Kim Kashkashian’s viola draws the personal through the political until both seem filaments of one buried nerve. Mourning gathers speed and reveals dance inside its dark clothing, while instrumental conversation becomes conversion, turning grief toward an exuberance too scarred to call innocent.

That traffic between fragment and world deepens in György Kurtág’s Hommage à R.Sch (ECM New Series 1508), where the dedicatory composer’s miniature forms become living particles. Piano and clarinet gather around the viola in the eponymous Hommage à R.Sch., op. 15d, giving the music sudden visibility. Schumann enters through Märchenbilder Fairy Tale Pictures), op. 113, although arrival proves too stable a word. Its vignettes emerge from Kurtág’s afterimage, each microscopically tuned to affection.

Keith Jarrett’s traversal of Händel’s keyboard suites (ECM New Series 1530) offers a lucid counterweight. The recitative-shaped opening of Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427 carries the vocal Händel in embryonic form before the Fuga opens its intricate gates. The pianist’s telescoped dynamics give ornament ethical weight, as every flourish answers to proportion. Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (ECM New Series 1523), represented here by three selections in Herbert Henck’s grave illumination, carries inwardness past the edge of utterance. Mompou’s “silent music” inhabits the soul’s inner ear, where sound waits inside solitude for the touch that will give it contour. Henck allows the notes to hover at the fringe of incarnation.

Sacred language assumes more labyrinthine form in Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s reading of Messiaen’s Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (ECM New Series 1494). The French composer’s communicable language encodes Aquinas into the organ, converting theology into an audible grammar whose meaning remains partly sealed. Part VII places density in the upper register, where sin becomes molecular and descends through imagined soil. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Speciálník (ECM New Series 1504) approaches inscription from another century. In natali domini advances in luminous block chords touched by chromatic ornament, while Pulcherrima Rosa unfurls a melodic current whose anonymity feels sovereign. The Prague manuscript becomes a living archive under these voices, crossing five centuries without surrendering its obscurity.

Giya Kancheli occupies the anthology’s most desolate interior. In Exil (ECM New Series 1535), the Paul Celan setting Einmal rises from an alto flute invocation that arrests the heart before Maacha Deubner’s unaffected soprano enters. Tapped bows and glassy harmonics place enormous force inside a nearly vacant field. The related Abii ne viderem (ECM New Series 1510) expands this monastic material into orchestral mass. Staccato eruptions are joined by abysses of silence until a full statement arrives, weighted by the piano’s pulse.

The cello works on Patrick Demenga and Thomas Demenga’s 12 Hommages A Paul Sacher (ECM New Series 1520-21) transform a patron’s name into generative code. The Sacher hexachord is an alphabet evolving into timbre. Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher gives the dedication a tensile intimacy, with conflict touching agreement within one speaking body. Luciano Berio’s Les Mots Sont Allés opens modest notes into fractal agency, language departing only to discover further chambers inside the instrument. A different dialogue animates Robyn Schulkowsky and Nils Petter Molvær’s Hastening Westward (ECM New Series 1564). In “Pier And Ocean II,” foregrounded cymbals create an aerial plane for Molvær’s trumpet, while deeper impacts lend the scene sanctity freed from doctrine. Percussion supplies a shifting anatomy; trumpet becomes the consciousness passing through it, visible to itself for one impossible instant.

A program dedicated entirely to Sándor Veress (ECM New Series 1555), performed by Camerata Bern with Heinz Holliger, is another homage. Veress taught Kurtág and wrote the Passacaglia Concertante for Holliger, so inheritance here passes in genuine form. A plucked string drops an idea into depth, and viola-rich currents carry its consequences outward as Holliger’s oboe burns through the structure with intimate authority. His own Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (ECM New Series 1540) divides that authority between folklore and verbal fracture. Alb-Chehr recounts a cowherd’s ghostly encounter through playful color shadowed by fatal knowledge, while Beiseit lets Robert Walser’s words dictate their own arrhythmias. Countertenor, clarinet, accordion, and double bass inhabit an intimacy sharpened by the recording site, a psychiatric institute whose walls seem to have retained every unsounded syllable. Und ging briefly turns lyrical, yet lyricism here bears the delicate unease of a door found open in a room no one remembers entering.

Across this rare compilation, the New Series ideal emerges as an art of attunement to what has not fully entered the world. ECM’s celebrated spaciousness consequently feels less acoustic than ontological. These recordings suggest that consciousness may itself be a form of chamber music, each self sounding only because another presence has drawn a bow across its silence.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this disc to my attention.

ECM New Releases Autumn 2012

| Tyran Grillo

This double-disc promotional sampler appears to be the only one explicitly devoted to both ECM proper and its classical New Series imprint, making it one of the label’s most consummate yearly portraits. Its two halves suggest adjoining chambers within the same heart. Since the ECM disc was also issued individually as ECM Music & Words: Autumn 2012 for the Italian magazine Musica Jazz (see my review here), our attention turns to the New Series side.

Johann Sebastian Bach provides the foundation through András Schiff’s recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier (ECM New Series 2270-73). The work is an origin story written in the grammar of recurrence, and Schiff’s total avoidance of pedal makes its restraint a potent expressive tool. In Book I’s C major Prelude, the timeless arpeggios acquire linguistic pressure. Schiff transforms the piano into a syllabic organ, every tone carrying the faint memory of a mouth. By the fugue, Bach’s nerves have made their way into a river’s flow.

From that immense design, the sampler contracts into the charged particles of György Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, as heard on Kurtág/Ligeti: Music for Viola (ECM New Series 2240), as performed by Kim Kashkashian. In “Panaszos Nóta” (“Plaintive Tune”), the violist’s exaggerated vibrato lends a metallic vulnerability, as notes negotiate their own survival before withdrawing into the instrument’s wooden dark.

John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, from As It Is (ECM New Series 2268), offers another form of divination through Alexei Lubimov and Natalia Pschenitschnikova. Language hovers near semantic collapse while Lubimov turns the piano into a cabinet of knocks and intimations. Pschenitschnikova allows James Joyce’s words to shed meaning without surrendering their magnetic charge. Although this track also appeared on the above-mentioned standalone sampler with Paul Hindemith’s Ragtime, the present collection represents Anna Gourari’s Canto Oscuro (ECM New Series 2255) through Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s “Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ.” Beneath her hands, melody ascends as a thought trying to remember the mind that first contained it.

Valery Afanassiev enters a different temporal fissure through Franz Schubert’s Moments musicaux (ECM New Series 2215). These late works sustain an unstable exchange between ebullience and melancholy, of which the Allegro moderato inhabits that brink with childlike wonder, jumping into the muddy puddles of the heart and discovering that their reflections lead downward.

Valentin Silvestrov’s Sacred Songs (ECM New Series 2279) further loosens chronology with the Songs for Vespers of 2006, of which “Come, Let Us Worship” draws a single thread through two millennia, its shifting harmonies washing radiance in shadow before releasing it into the ear. The Alleluja-Tropus from Arvo Pärt’s Adam’s Lament (ECM New Series 2225) sets liturgical words devoted to St. Nicholas of Myra. In this music, the body is time’s most temporary form of handwriting.

Elsewhere, an orchard is being cultivated for instruments that have not yet been invented. Tiny tuning forks ripen on its branches while snow falls upward into a sleepless moon. The silence tastes faintly of iron and pears, and the only image we have left is that which shows us as we are.

Special thanks to David Wakeham for bringing this rarity to my attention.

New Releases 2018/1 ECM

| Tyran Grillo

Across selections gathered in this rare promotional release, ECM’s 2018 landscape holds together by an invisible underground current in which every melody becomes a thread whose destination remains mercifully uncertain. John Surman opens that map on Invisible Threads (ECM 2588). In “At First Sight,” his soprano enters the upper air, stitching daylight to the needle-eye of time. Thomas Strønen’s Lucus (ECM 2576) carries this paradox inward. “Time Is A Blind Guide” separates filaments of interpretation from emotional moonbeams, suggesting that guidance may begin precisely where sight relinquishes authority. On Contra la Indecisión (ECM 2582), the Bobo Stenson Trio gives Silvio Rodríguez’s “Canción contra la indecisión” a unified tenderness. Deprived of words, the song discovers another grammar in touch: melody becomes a hand passed between players, each musician safeguarding its meaning with tenderness.

The human voice enters this space bearing the knowledge that affection often recognizes itself through distance. Norma Winstone transforms “What Is A Youth?” on Descansado (ECM 2567) into a dark lens for parries of desire, her phrasing suspended between confession and the private afterimage of confession. Elina Duni’s Partir (ECM 2587) makes departure even more elemental. Domenico Modugno’s “Amara Terra Mia” opens as many doors as it has words, then leaves each one trembling on its hinges. With the scene stripped to voice and guitar, ancestral ground becomes an umbilical memory severed for the sake of itinerancy. Uncertainty shadows every vocal step, while the guitar offers a small republic of earth beneath it. Elsewhere, Ketil Bjørnstad’s A Suite of Poems (ECM 2440) finds a more mischievous form of displacement. In “Astor Crowne, New Orleans,” Anneli Drecker steers a blues-inflected drinking song through whimsy, turning the tavern into a temporary country whose citizenship lasts only as long as breath can carry a phrase.

Other performances navigate by enlarging the sky within the instrument. Shinya Fukumori’s For 2 Akis (ECM 2574) begins with “Hoshi Meguri No Uta,” Kenji Miyazawa’s “The Star-Circling Song,” whose original words enlist Polaris as a guide through the visible universe. Its historical aura reaches toward Japan’s interwar preservation of folk culture, but Fukumori approaches the past as a living correspondence rather than a museum seal. Walter Lang’s lyric curiosity illuminates the route, and Matthieu Bordenave’s vulnerable tone gives stardust a pulse. Nicolas Masson pursues a related bond on Travelers (ECM 2578), where “Gagarine” moves through continually altered currents. The saxophone exceeds the boundary of the body producing it; song sustains the instrument until player and horn dissolve into a shared horizon. In Jakob Bro’s Returnings (ECM 2546), “Strands” constructs a tesseract inside the floating mind. Its geometry seeks purchase without demanding surrender, tethering consciousness to an elsewhere whose dimensions can be heard but never entered whole.

Ground and altitude keep exchanging masks. On Kit Downes’s Obsidian (ECM 2559), the floating arpeggios of “Kings” score their images with a palette knife. A horizontal path tilts upward against gravity, weighted by Downes’s contrary motions and his spontaneous deference to suggestion. Somewhere inside the music, a boy crosses hills in search of a destiny no one has selected for him, leaving an audible trail for those whose blindness has sharpened other forms of vision. Mathias Eick’s Ravensburg (ECM 2584) assembles “Children” within the puzzle logic associated with the album’s Southern German namesake. Eick’s singing voice extends his trumpet’s long residence in the throat. Håkon Aase threads his violin through the deeper channels Eick carves, while Andreas Ulvo and the rhythm section give the terrain a responsive consciousness.

That self-awareness darkens and intensifies across the instrumental ensembles. “Thirteen,” from the Andy Sheppard Quartet’s Romaria (ECM 2577), lets guitar swells recover the spacious grace once brought by Terje Rypdal to Ketil Bjørnstad’s The Sea. Kristjan Randalu’s Absence (ECM 2586) works through briefer inscriptions; “Lumi II” reveals process by granting Ben Monder’s painterly imagination room to wander beyond the frame. Circularity becomes an ethical discipline in “Modul 60” from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin’s Awase (ECM 2603). Tender and shadowed, this interlude uncovers depth through return. Marc Sinan and Oğuz Büyükberber fracture that depth on White (ECM 2558). “there I,” the opening section of Büyükberber’s five-part suite, releases a free-jazz kaleidoscope of windows nested within windows.

Arild Andersen’s In-House Science (ECM 2594) brings the experiment to combustion. “Mira” rises from the bassist’s luminous tone before Paolo Vinaccia and Tommy Smith drive it toward a brightness nearly hostile to vision. A fleeting uplift vanishes before it can harden into reassurance. These powerful characters merge through radical attentiveness, exchanging leadership with the fluidity of thought moving between minds.

Steve Tibbetts closes this constellation by bringing cosmic scale into the foreground. On Life Of (ECM 2599), “Life Of Emily” trades earth for flesh, with fatherhood refracting sunlight through rain held just beyond arrival. The album’s invisible routes finally converge in the fact of another person, whose existence redraws the map simply by entering it. Perhaps this is what all these musicians have been circling: every note entrusted to the unknown is an act of parenthood, responsible for a future it will never see to full fruition.

Special thanks to David Wakeham for bringing this album to my attention.

Ralph Alessi: A Sun That Never Sets (ECM 2864)

| Tyran Grillo

Ralph Alessi
A Sun That Never Sets

Ralph Alessi trumpet
Joseph Alessi trombone
Matt Mitchell piano
John Hébert double bass
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone
Recorded February 2025
Oktaven Audio Studio, Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mixed by Manfred Eicher, Ralph Alessi, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Ralph Alessi and Manfred Eicher
Release date: July 3, 2026

On A Sun That Never Sets, Ralph Alessi expands the architecture of his quartet by adding a second horn: his brother Joseph, a trombonist best known for his work with the New York Philharmonic. Their shared history gives the music an immediate intimacy, but the album draws its energy from the differences between their voices. Joseph is more than a featured guest. His burnished tone changes the ensemble’s center of gravity and reveals new colors in Ralph’s compositions. The result is an album concerned with kinship, not only between brothers but also between freedom and form.

Pianist Matt Mitchell and bassist John Hébert return alongside Ches Smith, who moves between drums and vibraphone. The musicians navigate Alessi’s writing with confidence, allowing angular ideas to open into clearings where lyricism can emerge without becoming sentimental. The influences of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky remain present without sounding imitative. Coleman’s example encourages melodic liberty, while Stravinsky’s is evident in the music’s rhythmic disruptions and structural precision. These forces help the album sound cerebral but never clinical. Each musician receives ample space, yet every contribution remains connected to the group’s larger movement.

The title track establishes this language through a precise theme that gradually loosens into exploratory improvisation. Smith’s vibraphone and Hébert’s bass approach the music from different angles, creating productive uncertainty over where its rhythmic and harmonic direction originates. Mitchell supports Alessi’s trumpet without restricting it, enabling the bandleader to move beyond the tune’s apparent boundaries while retaining a thread back to its central idea. The performance captures the strength of a quintet that can surrender a fixed destination without losing its sense of direction. Unity comes through the negotiation of contrasting approaches rather than strict agreement.

Several pieces turn that tension inward. “Nothing Is Dead” suspends piano and vibraphone within an elusive harmonic atmosphere, allowing its meaning to emerge gradually. Alessi’s trumpet is assured but guarded, conveying emotional weight without forcing a single interpretation. In “Ether,” Smith’s brushed drumming opens space beneath Mitchell’s wide range of touch, attracting fragments of memory into the present.

The closing “Behind Clouds” extends this fascination with concealed presence. Over Hébert’s steady, intoning bass, the ensemble proceeds with melodic care. Placed beside “Nothing Is Dead,” it creates correspondence across the record, as both compositions examine how absence can remain active.

The brothers’ most prominent duets, “Relaxed Misery” and “Of Trees (Variations on a Theme by TB),” bring the album’s interest in inherited language into sharper focus. Trumpet and trombone circle one another through muted exchanges, sometimes converging and sometimes letting the space between them carry the conversation. “Relaxed Misery” earns the sardonic tension of its title, turning discomfort into buoyancy and giving Ralph room for some of his most animated soloing. “Of Trees” is more oblique, developing its theme through disparities that keep the source partly hidden. The pieces share a jaunty, alert quality, but their emotional charge comes from the brothers’ ability to recognize and challenge one another in real time.

A familial current also runs through “Twichild,” “Slow Dancing Bear” and “Duck Face,” whose titles suggest private humor and childhood memory. Each uses wonder as a disciplined way of reconsidering familiar materials. “Twichild” follows delicate, winding lines toward a more inward mood, with Ralph’s precision made unusually vulnerable. “Slow Dancing Bear” finds tenderness in an awkward rhythmic gait, allowing weight and grace to coexist. On “Duck Face,” Hébert provides a perceptive countervoice before Smith’s solo releases the tune from its established footing. Together, the tracks treat play as a vital form of communication.

“Sweet Spot” occupies a warmer region. Its spacious, glowing color recalls Enrico Rava, while Mitchell’s piano creates a suspended foundation beneath the horns. Joseph’s trombone contributes a dusky depth that approaches a lullaby without becoming overly sweet. Small harmonic disturbances keep the tune’s balance alive. “Transitional Imagery,” by contrast, converts instability into propulsion. Mitchell and the rhythm section move with fierce clarity, shapeshifting as they proceed. The title could describe Alessi’s broader method: his music is most alive when one shape gives way to another.

Across these 11 originals, Alessi’s fluency as a player and composer gains a more varied context. The expanded ensemble shows how strongly his music depends on the willingness to offer an unfinished thought and let another musician transform it. His writing gives each player a distinct orbit while maintaining a field of mutual consequence. Freedom, therefore, carries responsibility, since every spontaneous gesture changes what is available to the others.

Steve Swallow: Winter Songs (ECM 2879)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Swallow
Winter Songs

Mike Rodriguez trumpet
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone
Steve Cardenas guitar
Gil Goldstein piano
Steve Swallow bass
Adam Nussbaum drums
Recorded September 2024 at Sear Sound, New York
Engineer: Tyler McDiarmid
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
An ECM Production
Release date: June 26, 2026

“I was there when this music was written. In fact, my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. Before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe.”
–Steve Swallow

Winter Songs is one of those albums that arrives quietly, carrying the circumstances that shaped it. Steve Swallow’s first true leader date since 2013’s Into The Woodwork, and his first appearance on the label since contributing to John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, does not present itself as a comeback. Instead, it sounds like music assembled among close friends, with each idea given time to settle into its clearest form. Its restraint, therefore, evokes the confidence of an artist with nothing left to prove.

Swallow is joined by saxophonist Chris Cheek, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, drummer Adam Nussbaum, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and pianist Gil Goldstein. These longtime collaborators approach the material with patience and mutual trust. The horns add color without crowding the arrangements, Cardenas and Goldstein outline the harmony, and Nussbaum keeps the time flexible. Swallow’s distinctive electric bass moves through the ensemble with unforced grace. He rarely demands the foreground, but the group continually turns around the quiet authority of his phrasing. No one treats space as something that must be filled, and that shared worldview gives the performances much of their character.

Recorded at Sear Sound in New York in September 2024, Winter Songs suggests a warm room in a cold climate. Fluid swing, reflective balladry, and chamber-like precision coexist throughout. The improvisations never mistake intensity for discovery. Instead, the music finds momentum in subtle shifts of weight, tone, and emphasis, with ideas passing naturally between the players. Its calm is active rather than static, sustained by close attention to every change in direction.

The titles, taking simple form as spelled-out numbers, leave the music open to association. “One” and “Nine,” positioned at opposite ends of the sequence, share a luminous tenderness. “One” moves with understated assurance. Rodriguez delivers a sensitive solo, and Cheek follows with what feels like a thoughtful reply. Their exchange shows how two melodic voices can meet without competing. “Nine” carries that generosity into a more spacious setting. Piano and guitar establish a delicate atmosphere before Rodriguez’s trumpet gives the piece direction and weight. Its grace comes from the ensemble’s trust: each musician holds a part of the tangram, but the complete shape emerges from their cumulative outcome.

The more rhythmically driven pieces are equally controlled. “Two” is a midtempo performance whose strengths become clearer with repeated listening. Swallow navigates its shifting harmonies so easily that their complexity feels instinctive. Goldstein finds fresh routes through the composition, while Nussbaum’s cymbals add brightness and motion. Cheek’s concise solo is especially compelling; his pauses give the phrases room to register. “Four” builds on a rounded backbeat and restrained, slow-moving funk. The horns braid their lines naturally before Goldstein explores the harmonic implications of their exchange. The groove is steady but never forceful. “Six” releases more of the energy held in reserve elsewhere, allowing Cheek to stretch across a broader emotional range. Rodriguez takes up that momentum in his own ascending solo. Even at its most animated, however, the ensemble remains disciplined.

Cardenas takes the foreground on “Five,” using light, pastel-toned voicings that add color without unnecessary density. Cheek enters with a solo that builds gradually while preserving the performance’s even keel. On “Eight,” Goldstein creates small openings in the piano texture, and Cheek responds with measured emotion. In both tracks, timbre shapes how the compositions develop.

“Three” and “Seven” lead into the album’s deepest interior. “Three” unfolds at an unhurried pace under Goldstein’s guidance, with Cardenas adding brief, pointillistic guitar figures near the end. The melody feels patient, lucid, and seasoned without calling attention to its maturity. Its force comes from clarity rather than drama, and the arrangement trusts the listener to meet it at that level. “Seven” brings Swallow most clearly into focus. He states the melody against Goldstein’s soft-pedaled chords and Cardenas’s fluid picking, creating the album’s quiet fulcrum. Swallow makes the tune sound discovered rather than declared, while Goldstein and Cardenas surround it with carefully placed details.

The numerical titles might suggest order, but Swallow uses them to emphasize relationship rather than measurement. Each piece gains meaning through the musicians’ responses to one another. The end effect is an album that is modest in presentation but substantial in feeling, a late-career statement whose assurance lies in how little it needs to insist on itself.