ECM Records

Norma Winstone: Somewhere Called Home (ECM 1337)

| Tyran Grillo

Norma Winstone
Somewhere Called Home

Norma Winstone voice
John Taylor piano
Tony Coe clarinet, tenor saxophone
Recorded July 1986 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

After her stunning contributions to ECM via the enigmatic outfit known as Azimuth, jazz vocalist Norma Winstone broke out, or should I say broke in, her solo career with Somewhere Called Home. Joined by pianist John Taylor and Tony Coe on clarinet and tenor saxophone, she lends her sympathetic draw to the canonic tree while also hanging it with her own lyric adornments to the music of Egberto Gismonti, Ralph Towner, and Kenny Wheeler. The finished session is burnished to a dim reflection of yesteryear.

From the first measured steps of “Café,” Taylor’s gentle snowflakes and Coe’s fluted reeds are perfect companions. This is a song, like so many, of people and places intersecting in romances as fleeting as the words they’re built upon. The title track is a geodesic shape of ebony and ivory, splashed with the prismatic light of Winstone’s lilting phrasings. Patterns of loneliness emerge, seeking in the human voice the solace from which our pain also arises, and through which we purge the very same. Taylor and Coe run off, hand in harmonic hand, rushing through the wilds of memory, leaving Winstone to paint the veil of winter in “Sea Lady” with a translucent river of spring, where love flows into an ocean of forgetfulness. “Some Time Ago” opens with a mournful cry from Coe, dropping us talon-first into a sky of childhoods. Every chord from Taylor is a wisp of cloud, gone too soon in a dragon’s breath. Winstone spins the mythology of love into a jewel of hope that shines only in the sunlight of the future. She waits, breathing in the world so that she might exhale the promise of another morning, of another kiss, of another embrace. The delicate impressionisms of “Prologue” and “Out Of This World” recall at once the French symbolists and Manuel de Falla’s Psyche. Coe enchants with every flap of his virtuosic wings, lending his ethereal tenor to “Celeste.” This bittersweet exploration of songcraft catches up to us like an ancestral figure. Every breath of the sax is like that figure’s movements, by turns flesh and shadow, and brought to active life by the erosion of the high note, which chips away like a welding torch at the resolve of our solitude. “Hi Lili Hi Lo” takes comfort in the fact that in order to fall in love, one must jump, blindfolded, from a great height indeed. With “Tea For Two,” we at last get the assurance of a lover’s arms cradling not just our bodies, but also our souls. That gorgeous tenor returns for a final heave, ending where it all began, folded in the origami of time.

Winstone washes away the clothing of every sentiment, exposing the naked flesh of words. Her melodies swim in life’s tormented sea, compressing the universe into a salty teardrop of pure expression. While this date may not be for everyone, it is for me another candidate for inclusion in ECM’s Top 10. A profound, meditative masterpiece that will grow as you do.

<< Meredith Monk: Do You Be (ECM 1336 NS)
>> Mark Isham/Art Lande: We Begin (ECM 1338)

Keith Jarrett Trio: Standards Live (ECM 1317)

| Tyran Grillo

Keith Jarrett Trio
Standards Live

Keith Jarrett piano
Gary Peacock bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded July 2, 1985 at the Palais dis Congrès Studios de la Grand Armée
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Take one look at the thoughtful cover art of this seminal Keith Jarrett release, and you’ll gain immediate insight into what makes his trio click. Each curvaceous line brings a lifetime of movement, of study, and of passion to bear on the music at hand. And with these six standards resurrected to such profound levels, there’s nothing not to like.

Just let the groove of “Falling In Love With Love” have its way, and the quicksand of the trio’s genius has you by the heart. Jarrett is in his element, crying his way through sibilant improvisatory arcs. Peacock surfaces for an engaging solo, Jarrett watching from the sidelines with duly attentive chording before sharing an intuitive stichomythia with DeJohnette. Peacock grabs the spotlight again in “The Old Country,” in which piano and drums spread a subtle launching pad for his low yet adroit flights. Jarrett builds on these, dancing on air through every motivic change before putting the starlight back into “Stella By Starlight.” Ever the sonic chameleon in a world of primary colors, he achieves the musical equivalent of alchemy once his ever-faithful rhythm section dashes in its own mysterious elements. A magnetic bass solo draws DeJohnette’s cymbals like iron filings before ending in a forgiving embrace. “Too Young To Go Steady” receives an absorbing treatment, the band whipping up a soft peak that melts smoothly into resolution. Next is a spirited version of “The Way You Look Tonight,” which unpacks oodles of bliss and shows the trio form at its finest. A whoop-worthy solo from DeJohnette forms an enlivening bridge to the vamp, playing us out into “The Wrong Blues,” which does everything oh so right.

While all the tunes on this album are classic, the untouchable performances make them doubly so.

Beyond recommended.

<< Kim Kashkashian/Robert Levin: Elegies (ECM 1316 NS)
>> Stephan Micus: Ocean (ECM 1318)

First House: Eréndira (ECM 1307)

| Tyran Grillo

 

First House
Eréndira

Ken Stubbs alto and soprano saxophones
Django Bates piano
Mick Hutton bass
Martin France drums, percussion
Recorded July 1985 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A session like the one documented on Eréndira can easily made or broken by a saxophonist, and I’m happy to say that Ken Stubbs succeeds with plenty of inspiration to spare. His soloing is at once ponderous and restless, constantly moving in and out of shadow, adding just the right amount of cursive to his flowing script. With the help of Bill Bruford’s Earthworks double agents Django Bates and Mick Hutton on keyboards and bass, along with drummer Martin France, he leads this young fusion outfit’s debut with stylish, mature writing and deft exchanges all around.

“A Day Away” starts as if awakening, those first rustlings of the morning flittering across France’s kit, Bates opening his eyes as butterfly’s wings to sunlight, while Hutton takes our first steps, breathing in the saxophone’s crisp air. Stubbs carries a gentle tune in “Innocent Eréndira,” lilting over bass and a gentle tat of cymbals. Like an airborne serpent falling to the ground with that final breath, he slithers into a dark hole before opening the thematic radar of his cobra fan for “The Journeyers To The East.” This touch-and-go excursion finds the album’s surest traction, and seems to wink at us, knowingly. The rhythm section excels, launching Stubbs into a backflip that allows the soles of his feet to graze the underbellies of the clouds. Pay particular attention to Bates here, and you’ll know why he was already one of the hottest jazz pianists of the 1980s. “Bracondale” and “Grammenos” lull us into surrender with promises that Hutton and Stubbs fulfill with grace. The latter tune swirls with wondrous enervation, Stubbs scaling a mountain of tight hooks and crashing improv before sliding back into a forlorn back (v)alley. The brief wave that follows in “Stranger Than Paradise” washes us onto the shores of “Bridge Call,” a lonesome dove spreading its melodic feathers over rivers and islands. Another brief teardrop falls in “Doubt, Further Away,” trickling down the face of one who is about to smile for the first time in ages.

Thus ends a beautiful, seemingly forgotten album from a quartet of musicians who tended to involve themselves in more progressive acts. Here, they take it back home. Don’t pass this one by.

<< Ralph Towner/Gary Burton: Slide Show (ECM 1306)
>> Shankar/Caroline: The Epidemics (ECM 1308)

Gary Burton Quartet: Real Life Hits (ECM 1293)

| Tyran Grillo

Gary Burton Quartet
Real Life Hits

Gary Burton vibes, marimba
Makoto Ozone piano
Steve Swallow bass guitar
Mike Hyman drums
Recorded November 1984 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Vibraphonist Gary Burton was one of the hottest things around in the 1980s, his quartet a springboard for up-and-comers like Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone, who shines alongside bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Mike Hyman as if he’d grown up with the guys. A sparkling talent, Ozone adds color where there is only monochrome, and vice versa. He is at once ethereal and down to earth, emotes with a sweeping grandeur yet regales us with his intimacy at the keyboard. The syncopations he adds to the album’s two Carla Bley tunes are head-on wondrous. These include the complex title number, with its deft interweaving of vibes and keys, and the sprightly “Syndrome.” Like its eponym, this opener is an inescapable groove of activity, a fiery yet clean spring to concerted action. Swallow is in his usual leapfrog mode here, jumping from one palette of energy to another with ease. Ozone also grounds us deeper than we’d ever expect in the bassist’s “Ladies In Mercedes,” a groovy montuno exercise that features marimba in place of vibes.  Burton makes the normally muted instrument sparkle with his pointillism, which also boggles us with its precision in German Lukyanov’s “Ivanushka Durachok” (a rare dip into Russian jazz). With its catchy bass line and effervescent vibes, this piano-driven head nod is right where you want to be. Three slices of nostalgia round out the set, including the gorgeous seesaw of Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine” and John Scofield’s “The Beatles” (John Scofield). These quiet vessels carry us into the waters of Ozone’s own balladic contribution, “I Need You Here.” Bubbling with Burton’s exceptional mallet work, this tearjerker hits us where it hurts.

This is yet another solid outing from Burton and company. Like the cover art, it is something of a collage that makes for a complete portrait of a time and place, a snapshot with a living soundtrack. This is real life.

<< Dave Holland Quintet: Seeds of Time (ECM 1292)
>> Jan Garbarek Group: It’s OK to listen to the gray voice (ECM 1294)

Terje Rypdal/David Darling: Eos (ECM 1263)

| Tyran Grillo

Terje Rypdal
David Darling
Eos

Terje Rypdal electronic guitar, casio mt-30
David Darling cello, electric cello
Recorded May 1983 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renewed.
–Alfred Lord Tennyson

Eos. Greek goddess of the dawn. Aurora to the Romans. She of the rosy fingers and golden arms. A welcome companion as we take in these private explorations from Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal and American cellist David Darling. Although further collaborations would reveal themselves on The Sea and Skywards, it was on Eos that they first tested the former’s mettle against the latter’s fluid tensions. The session begins where you might, depending on your temperament, least or most expect: in the solar eclipse of “Laser.” Rypdal sharpens his tools alone, raining sparks and molten glass. From this lit match burns a slow and epic fuse in the 14-and-a-half-minute title improvisation. Here the unlikely duo charts its deepest waters, covering our expectations in a muslin screen. Like a dream, it pulls at our feet with heartrending pathos, Rypdal bleeding coronas as he croaks into life. After this graft of spiritual skin, we continue our slumber in “Bedtime Story,” where an angelic drone cradles Darling’s plaintive acoustic and finds a willing partner in Rypdal’s amplified warble. Yet the skies begin to pale in “Light Years,” where the promise of interstellar travel becomes a fantasy for the lonely. As the stars wash into a white blanket around us, we see in the eyes of the cosmos a dire reflection. The world as we know it has vanished, and we are the only ones left with any concept of time. Our guide is the “Melody” that follows. Its wrists are frail, dusted like Saturn’s rings, and equally impossible to grasp. Still they lead, bringing to bear a false promise in “Mirage.” Rypdal’s snaking lines burrow into this pizzicato landscape without ever looking back, shaking off the residue of memory in favor of an enlightened solitude. This leaves us in the sweetness of “Adagietto,” where loving arms grow from dark matter like dandelions, blown into countless galaxies by the breath of Theia herself.

<< Kenny Wheeler: Double, Double You (ECM 1262)
>> Alfred Harth: This Earth! (ECM 1264)

Michael Fahres: piano. harfe (ECM New Series 1281)

| Tyran Grillo

Michael Fahres
piano. harfe

Polo de Haas piano
Gyde Knebusch harp
Paul Godschalk live electronics
Hans Stibbe live electronics
Digital Recording, August 1982, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

German-born, Netherlands-based composer and sound installation artist Michael Fahres flirted with ECM for the duration of this single album only. Simply titled after its two central instruments, this vinyl-only rarity gives healthy intimations of the electro-acoustic depth for which he is now so highly regarded.

We find in both of these early pieces a sense of self-directed wonder, as if one’s reflection has come to life and danced a version of the future. The low note that spawns a taped echo in piano sets just such a tone. A crack in the window of our desires spiders its way to the edges, falling into the garden when it has nowhere else to go. Every shard sprouts legs and trips through the underbrush. Foxes and moles—each a clouded memory returning with soft vengeance—nip at their ankles like herding dogs. The live piano stares into a digital mirror. Thus confronted with its mortality, it grows still, like a foot poised above a landscape of eggshells. Behind closed eyes, it falls into looped miracles. The jangle at the periphery, never clear before, is now crystalline. Voices tremble, a flock of rubber bands falling one at a time into a synthetic gallop. Veins resonate, each the tube of a televised existence. Your hand passes through childhood like the illusion it is, a canopy of little legs kicking above its Alvin Lucier-like current. They crawl over one another as high as they can, growing more distorted with every promise, until there is only shadow to hold you.

But then, in harfe, strings are touched by flesh, each unfolding a city map. Streets hum like birth. (The atmosphere reminds me of a Zeena Parkins performance I once attended as a teenager: an undercurrent of restless comfort bedding naked scrawls.) Between watery ascents and muddy stumbles, someone speaks: “The voice of reason is the one that achieves distance.” There is a beating of the string, subtle and barely noticeable. A knock at the door of a museum where only the debris of earthquakes is shown. A meditation without eyes, a prickling of hairs, an imploding temple. There is something sacred implied here. Its transcendence melts into a single piece of candy, placed on a serpent’s tongue. The trees buckle their knees in guttural pathos, every torn root a string plucked by green hands. The sky awakens, pouring its flood into a restorative nightmare. Finis.

In spite of my unsettling impressions, I would never characterize this album as such. There is something hopeful about its inventiveness. In exploring the contours of ruin, it holds itself aloft, away from those whose only desire is to crush music into a dark key. The lock to that key is nowhere but here, floundering like a fish cradled back into a sea of twilight.

<< Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition: Album Album (ECM 1280)
>> Chick Corea: Voyage (ECM 1282)

Hajo Weber/Ulrich Ingenbold: Winterreise (ECM 1235)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1235

Hajo Weber
Ulrich Ingenbold
Winterreise

Hajo Weber guitar
Ulrich Ingenbold guitars, flutes
Recorded March 1982 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

I came as a stranger; as a stranger now I leave.

I know nothing of Hajo Weber and Ulrich Ingenbold beyond the incandescent duets these two guitarists buried in the snowy recesses of Winterreise (Winter Journey), one of ECM’s greatest forgotten treasures. The title, of course, evokes Schubert, and the comparison may not be so arbitrary, for like the famous song cycle it speaks with hushed clairvoyance. Weber and Ingenbold bring distinct flavor to this session, dividing themselves at four compositions apiece.

Weber’s are meandering. Filled with pauses and reflections, they measure the passage of time in breaths. Ingenbold gilds the wood-grained lily of “Der wundersame Weg” (The Miraculous Way) with a trembling flute. Gentle footsteps trade places with an unfamiliar cry, meditating on a horizon which, once distant, is now close enough to pluck and make music out of. “Zweifel” (Doubt) plays like its shadow, dancing through dreams as if this were the only possible means of expressing itself. The tides shift with “Drehung in der Luft” (Rotation in the Air), a floating reverie insulated from the cold, while the flamenco kiss of “Filmmusik” washes up on Aegean shores. The air is moist, glowing in the moon’s lantern light.

Ingenbold’s sound-world is more continuous, treating Weber’s backdrops as canvases for a virtuosic appliqué. His “Karussell” is the session’s masterstroke, and puts me in mind of the early cinematographs, spun into impossible animation through a gallery of slits, each the promise of an ephemeral life. The title cut teeters on a whisper. Amid a rustling of wings and tail feathers, the blade of uncertainty falls from the throat of time behind a shining veil of recollection. A child dances where children cannot be seen, but is safe beneath the snow, where spring hides from all. “Sommerregen” (Summer Rain) fulfills the promise made at the album’s outset. It is the Golden Fleece without curse, the light of better days without the pain of absence. We feel the wind on the rims of our ears, hoping for sunlight, but instead experience something far more invigorating: the song of melting ice. Ingenbold dons a flute’s clothing again in “Son’s Song.” A lullaby wrapped in dawn’s brittle skin, it wishes away evil even as Weber chases away the nightmares with his light. The music becomes flesh, the flesh becomes music, and the music becomes love.

Winterreise is a poetic diary that deserves only poetry in return, and ranks alongside Bill Connors’s Theme To The Gaurdian and Ralph Towner’s Solo Concert as one of ECM’s most evocative guitar dates. As long as a reissue seems unlikely, make this your first vinyl rediscovery.

<< Everyman Band: s/t (ECM 1234)
>> Arild Andersen: Molde Concert (ECM 1236)

Schubert: Sonate B-Dur op. posth. D 960 – Edition Lockenhaus, Vol. 3 (ECM New Series 1682)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1682

Edition Lockenhaus, Vol. 3:
Franz Schubert: Sonate B-Dur op. posth. D 960

Valery Afanassiev piano
Recorded July 1985 at the Lockenhaus Festival
Engineers: Peter Laenger and Stephan Schellmann
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Gidon Kremer

With over 100 recordings of Franz Schubert’s last sonata, one might ask: Why another? Valery Afanassiev gives us a resounding answer with this performance from the 1985 Lockenhaus Festival (a last-minute substitution for a canceled trio), bringing to glorious life what Bryce Morrison has called “the pianist’s Hamlet.” As a swan song, the B-flat Sonata may easily be read as a tarnished mirror where our mortality balks at its own reflection. Yet in the listening, I am wont to hear not the looming specter of death, but rather the fluttering of a curtain letting in the light. Like a piece of fruit rotting in reverse, the B-flat Sonata awakens to find that its decay was but a dream, that it is as crisp and as ripe as the day it was born.

As it stands, Afanassiev’s interpretation is broader than most and respires through a powerful dynamic range. In his liner notes the Moscow-born pianist speaks of absolute truth, and of how the low flutter of the opening movement—what he calls “the most uncanny trill in the history of music”—grounds us from our high horses. For him, this sonata is a monstrous thing, the shock of horror behind a veil of art. He also critiques himself for leaning on sentimentality, though I think we can forgive his brazenness, for it is of the gentlest kind.

The first movement begins where many would end: in utter suspension. Every rustling is a bird falling into an abyss of yearning, where memories collide with the yet to be. Voices bubble up from that seismic trill, shielding us from our own expectations. Afanassiev’s punctuations are expectorate and his ascending lines as lilting as they are forlorn. Implications of perpetual motion interlock their fingers with weighty pauses and distant considerations, resolving into stained-glass intimations of “Adeste Fideles.”

The formidable Andante—a Largo in Afanassiev’s hands—whispers in half-light. He builds this slow prance brick by ephemeral brick, as if through a haze of recollection. At eleven and a half minutes, it is among the longest versions on record, and clothes a heart that one finds beating even more nakedly in the piano works of Valentin Silvestrov. Reason enough to own this disc.

After the stark wash of this silent film, we are thrown into the sparkle of a Technicolor spectacle in the Scherzo before sliding down its rainbow into the final Allegro. Here Afanassiev’s deep breath acts as emotive bellow, seeming to blow dust at the feet of the finale, which remains frozen in mid air—racing but never quite touching ground, flapping but never quite lifting off.

Despite the breadth of his tonal spectrum, Schubert is not a composer who works in gradations, but in densities. The light is always there. We simply see or less of it depending on how porous the scrim of the music becomes. Some sections, like the opening leitmotif, are latticed; others are tightly woven baskets; still others, nets through which any hope may pass unfiltered. It is music that works in ages, by turns dancing and hunched on the gnarled cane of infirmity.

If Schubert speaks in tenses, then Afanassiev is a master conjugator. This is a rendering at once flagrant and conservative. A valuable performance to have on record.

<< Paul Giger: Ignis (ECM 1681 NS)
>> John Abercrombie: Open Land (ECM 1683)

Steve Tibbetts: Exploded View (ECM 1335)

| Tyran Grillo

 

Steve Tibbetts
Exploded View

Steve Tibbetts guitars, tapes, kalimba
Marc Anderson percussion
Bob Hughes bass
Marcus Wise tabla
Claudia Schmidt voice
Bruce Henry voice
Jan Reimer voice
Recorded 1985-86 in St. Paul, Minnesota
Engineer: Steve Tibbetts
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Two chipmunks of the oak at last found a way into the tree house, and would run cheerfully over us, breathing our heated breath; they slept in Blink’s lap for three days of blind violent storms that sheathed the forest in ice, which seemed to make music in the fine blue morning that followed, music too blinding to look at.
–John Crowley, Engine Summer

Bless the day Manfred Eicher decided to give Steve Tibbetts his own country in the ECM continent, where he has produced some of the label’s most transportive folkways. On Exploded View, we get a few licks of the fire that would utterly consume us in The Fall Of Us All (if not the other way around). This sits somewhere between that later masterpiece and the quieter heart of Northern Song. “Name Everything” bursts like a freshly lit match onto a geyser-pocked landscape, each beat from percussionist Marc Anderson an eruption of steam that proclaims the earth’s inner desires. “Another Year” is anchored by a glistening acoustic and gilded by that incendiary electric as spiraling internal avenues come to a head in an expansive choral palette. “A Clear Day And No Memories” carries on those vocal menageries with the prominent cries of Claudia Schmidt, who trails her song across an oceanic sky. These quiet into an acoustic aside, alive with rhythmic whispers. The pliant guitar of “Your Cat” is a wonder to behold in the full efficacy of its power, and evidences Tibbetts’s programmatic flair: the music is indeed feline in the way it arches its back, wiggles and pounces, purrs and dreams of the savannah, plays and loves. “Drawing Down The Moon” locks us into the subtlest of grooves, linked by the forward-looking tabla at its core, while “The X Festival” throbs with the voice of history. This superb blend of local and far-reaching mysteries cracks open the dawn, spilling its sunny yolk across the floodplains. The album’s most rhythmically intense moments can be found in “Metal Summer,” which again thrums at the core of something ineffable yet so visceral it can never be denied. Forgoing speech, its finds its voice in the elemental language of grinding flame that is Tibbetts’s modus operandi. Last is “Assembly Field,” another biting trek that ripples across the sands with the slow-motion whip of a sidewinder in search of an oasis it already carries inside, finding solace at last behind the closing eyes of a shimmering acoustic reflection.

Tibbetts chooses his grooves and comings together with tact and with grace, so that we never forget the vivacity of their placement. He shines his light through a necklace of motifs and cellular sound paintings. Take, for instance, the short but unforgettable “Forget,” which has all the makings of a universal anthem. It bristles with a fast head nod and electrical break in the production, keying us in to the malleable style of its surroundings. Like the guitarist at its center, it pulls the strings of time rather than plucking them for trite effect. In doing so, it unleashes an entire culture’s worth of footsteps.

<< Keith Jarrett: Spirits (ECM 1333/34)
>> Meredith Monk: Do You Be (ECM 1336 NS)