ECM Records

Hommage à R.Sch. (ECM New Series 1508)

| Tyran Grillo

György Kurtág
Robert Schumann
Hommage à R.Sch.

Kim Kashkashian viola
Robert Levin piano
Eduard Brunner clarinet
Recorded August 1992, May and September 1994, Kammermusiksaal Beethovenhaus, Bonn
Engineer: Peter Laenger
Produced by Manfred Eicher

During his lifetime, the idiosyncrasies of Robert Schumann earned him little of the posthumous admiration that now abounds. A Romantic to the core, he found solace in the hollow spaces of his rich musical ideas, manifested to greatest effect in the potent miniatures he left behind. Perhaps no one has inherited this legacy in such a life-affirming way as György Kurtág. In this brilliantly realized album, which pairs both composers in a fortuitous program, we hear not only the bridge that arches between their worlds, but also the river that flows beneath it. Kurtág’s micro-compositional Neun Stücke für Viola solo are threaded by thinnest of intentions and a captivating dynamic contrast between nervousness and lyricism (though, to be sure, what qualifies as lyricism here exists always at the molecular level). The fragment takes on sensory completeness, compensated as it is by the symbiosis of performance and listening, so that even in absence of an audience, the performer remains the immediate receiver of the audible gesture. Jelek (Signs) op. 5 brims with the rich, heady double stops of Kim Kashkashian’s faultless phrasing, ensuring that hidden messages ring with all the robust fragility that surrounds them. Kurtág’s lines are by turns pliant and rigid, vaccinated with moribund attention. Distinctions between “interior” and “exterior” become irrelevant and fold into a shapeless entity with neither. The album is ordered in such a way as to centralize the viola, so that when the piano and clarinet emerge in Hommage à R.Sch. op. 15d, they seem to flank it from all sides. Through this transition, the music becomes more “visible.”

With the Märchenbilder (Fairy Tale Pictures) op. 113, we finally encounter Schumann in the flesh, though “stumble over” might be the more accurate term, as Kurtág’s ghostly echoes release us so effortlessly that we barely have time to breathe. These four vignettes for viola and piano melt into the ecstatic dramaturgy of the Fantasiestücke op. 73, in which the clarinet has its say before merging with the viola in the uniquely scored Märchenerzählungen (Fairy Tales) op. 132. These are profoundly embodied works that render any descriptive words mute to the touch, leaving me with little to offer for all their wonders.

Steady performances from all three musicians—but especially from Kashkashian, whose strings unravel like a mummy in the dusky light of an interstellar awakening—make for an engaging experience from front to back. Therein lies a pyramidal cycle, with the composers at its base, and a thread of life at its apex, pulled ever taut by an unseen alien hand.

<< Wadada Leo Smith: Kulture Jazz (ECM 1507)
>> Egberto Gismonti Group: Música de Sobrevivência (ECM 1509)

Jack DeJohnette’s Directions: Untitled (ECM 1074)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1074

Jack DeJohnette’s Directions
Untitled

Jack DeJohnette drums, tenor saxophone
John Abercrombie electric and acoustic guitars
Alex Foster tenor and soprano saxophones
Mike Richmond bass, electric bass
Warren Bernhardt piano, electric piano, clavinet, cowbell
Recorded February, 1976 at Talent Studios, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With Untitled, Jack DeJohnette’s Directions popped a jazz milestone into ECM’s prolifically expanding oven, and it still smells as fresh as the day it was baked. Building off DeJohnette’s robust intro to the 14-minute “Flying Spirits,” a compelling quintet completed by guitar (John Abercrombie), bass (Mike Richmond), sax (Alex Foster), and keyboard (Warren Bernhardt) makes for an aerial interweaving of complementary signatures. The band kicks up a whirlwind of activity, leaving DeJohnette’s delicate applications to rustle like the last stray leaves blowing down the road, out of sight but ever in mind. “Pansori Visions” is an eccentric duet of hand drums and detuned guitar, slack strings sounding like the amplified offspring of a koto and a human voice. Not coincidentally, the title refers to a traditional Korean art form of often-satirical storytelling, also to the accompaniment of a single drummer. “Fantastic” is just that, its colorful percussive accents giving way to some infectious saxophonic action. In spite of the killer title, “The Vikings Are Coming” unfolds like something straight out of Pat Metheny’s Watercolors session, again striated by fluent reeds. “Struttin” evolves into a rather punchy face-off between saxophone and guitar, refereed superbly by DeJohnette. The only victory to be had is in the brief but bitter groove as it closes in resolute harmony. Bernhardt’s “Morning Star” begins with a duet of piano and acoustic guitar, the latter always one step behind. From these dream-like beginnings come a pronounced rhythm section and more melodic fortitude from alto. Capping off this invigorating set is “Malibu Reggae,” which slinks like a drunken dancer in slow motion, its delightfully kitsch keyboard gnawing at the edges of our curiosity with a familiar burn. A tune that would have sat easily among John Zorn’s Naked City abstractions in their heyday, it’s a whimsical ending to a powerfully direct album, ever blushing with hints of its own enigma.

These compositions—all but “Morning Star” are by DeJohnette with or without his collaborators—are bright, resilient, and vociferous. Having stood the test of three-plus decades, they will easily hold up to three more, and then some. And while our leader captivates with his usual kinesis, Foster’s vocal modulations and the unobtrusive support network of Abercrombie/Bernhardt/Richmond make this one for the ages. When you’ve had enough blues for one day, Untitled is as good a pick-me-up as you could ask for. A prime candidate for reissue.

<< Pat Metheny: Bright Size Life (ECM 1073)
>> Jan Garbarek: Dansere (ECM 1075)

Collin Walcott: Cloud Dance (ECM 1062)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1062

Collin Walcott
Cloud Dance

Collin Walcott sitar, tabla
John Abercrombie guitar
Dave Holland bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded March 1975 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The late, great Collin Walcott made his proper ECM debut on Cloud Dance (after an appearance three years earlier on Trios/Solos), where he was joined by the Gateway trinity—John Abercrombie, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette—for one of his most powerful albums ever to grace ECM’s vinyl (and later, digital, thanks to a vital Touchstone series reissue) grooves. The marrow-warming twang of Walcott’s sitar sets up the opening “Margueritte” to be a long raga, when suddenly Abercrombie’s electric appears in kind, beckoning a chill entourage of bass and drums and touching off a pair of graceful solos from Abercrombie and Holland. The album’s remainder is fleshed out by a variety of intimate configurations. “Night Glider” and “Vadana” both feature guitar, bass, and sitar, the latter two instruments feeding beautifully off one another, the guitar weaving in and out where it may. The two duets between Walcott and Holland, however, are really where this album gilds its worth. Our frontman lays out plush carpets of tabla and sitar on “Prancing” and “Eastern Song,” respectively, over which Holland takes stock of every variation of pattern and thread count. The second of these pieces, while the briefest of the album, is also one of its most mesmerizing. Contrary to what the titles might have us believe, these are all genuinely realized pieces where the word “exotic” is but another puff of smoke in the breeze. And so, the heavy tabla and shawm-like guitar of “Scimitar” describes not the weapon wielded in the hands of countless white actors in uninformed filmic productions, but rather an exploration of the object on its own terms, tracing forms and histories, battles and silences alike, with due abandon. So, too, with the final and title cut that brings DeJohnette back into the mix for an animated closer.

The telephone wires on the cover are like the strings of some large instrument, with the sky as its sound box. Its clouds don’t so much dance as perform, caressing endless waves of voices careening through the ether. The joy of Cloud Dance is that it makes those voices intelligible. Fans of Oregon, of which Walcott was of course an integral part, need look no further for likeminded contemplation.

<< Abercrombie/Holland/DeJohnnette: Gateway (ECM 1061)
>> Enrico Rava: The Pilgrim And The Stars (ECM 1063)

Schubert: Trio in Es-Dur/Notturno (ECM New Series 1595)

| Tyran Grillo

Franz Schubert
Trio in Es-Dur/Notturno

Jörg Ewald Dähler fortepiano
Hansheinz Schneeberger violin
Thomas Demenga cello
Recorded July 1995

ECM has nobly benefited the classical music industry by continuing to draw bold lines back to the works of Franz Schubert with consistently thoughtful performances and pairings. Although he never wrote for piano trio until his final year of life, Schubert seems to have put his all into the two masterworks that are the op. 99 and op. 100. For this major release, the latter has been paired with the often-neglected “Notturno,” published two decades after his death.

Harriett Smith calls the Trio in Es-Dur für Klavier, Violine und Violoncello op. 100, D 929 a “bridge between the trios of Beethoven and Brahms,” and was the longest ever composed (it equals, if not surpasses, the average symphony in scope) until Morton Feldman’s Trio of 1980. Penned in 1827, four years into the advancement of his syphilis, Schubert’s second piano trio came about when a close friend, Josef von Spaun, requested the piece for his wedding. Schubert would die in a matter of months after its premier, which reached his ears once before they heard no more.

The musicians superbly evoke the careful tension Schubert has worked into every phrase of the first movement. In its cosmos, one hears the voices of the stars, throttling the engine of space-time in dreamy suspension. A tinge of classicism adorns the Swedish folk song-enriched interior of the second movement, its delicate modality reflected in the pizzicato from both strings. An Austrian country-dance provides the basis for the Scherzo that follows, leading us into a massive Allegro moderato, which inventively brings back the theme of the second movement. Despite the daunting length of this and the first movement, our sense of progression never wavers. Schubert’s magical touches make exuberant experiences out of these longer narratives.

If, in the full trio, we get four worlds as one universe, in the Trio in Es-Dur für Klavier, Violine, Violoncello op. posth. 148, D 897 we get a glimpse into a newborn nebula. This single movement, dubbed “Notturno” (Nocturne) by publisher and composer Anton Diabelli, is believed to have been a rejected Adagio for the first piano trio in B flat major. As fragile as it is taut, it continues to thrive, a gorgeous offspring wrought in filigree and grace.

Jörg Ewald Dähler’s historically informed fortepiano, combined with the profoundly contemporary approaches of resident label cellist Thomas Demenga and the legendary Hansheinz Schneeberger on violin, infuses every moment of these performances with equal parts innovation and ritual. One need only listen behind closed eyes to see the images they recreate.

<< Peter Erskine Trio: As It Is (ECM 1594)
>> Misha Alperin: North Story (ECM 1596)

Pat Metheny: Watercolors (ECM 1097)

| Tyran Grillo

1097 X

Pat Metheny
Watercolors

Pat Metheny guitars
Lyle Mays piano
Eberhard Weber bass
Dan Gottlieb drums
Recorded February 1977 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

From the opening strains of Pat Metheny’s second album, we immediately know that we have a calming yet powerful journey ahead of us. The present company—among which keyboardist Lyle Mays, a Pet Metheny Group fixture, makes his first appearance—renders his characteristic combination of form and style into an instinctive wash of comfort. Mays’s pianism proves the perfect complement to the guitarist’s untainted sound. Just listen to the way he buoys the music in the opening title track, and his fluent solo in “River Quay,” and you will hardly be able to imagine the music without him. We get a lingering look at Metheny’s own abilities in “Icefire,” in which he solos on a cleverly tuned 12-string that lobs between solid chords and higher callings. Midway through, the music melts into its second titular half, flowering in a cluster of Ralph Towner-esque harmonics. “Oasis” introduces the harp guitar, a sympathetically strung instrument that shines in Metheny’s hands like the charango in Gustavo Santaolalla’s. A mournful electric sings at its center, ever shielded by an unrequited embrace of acoustics. Varied rhythms and bold chord changes animate its otherwise stagnant beauty. After these quiet submersions, we come up into air, and into light, with the beautiful “Lakes,” which positively glows with quiet ecstasies. Again, Mays broadens the edges to new waterlines, cresting like a wave that never crashes upon its thematic shores. A two-part suite proves a complex call and response with the self before the 10-minute “Sea Song” reprises the harp guitar for its swan song. The music here is beyond aquatic, and could easily have seeded a Ketil Bjørnstad project. Eberhard Weber’s smooth bass introduces the morning’s regular activities with the first rays of sunrise in countless awakening eyes, before rolling out once again, drawn back into the depths like the tide that gives them life.

Metheny’s precision dives and soars, a most selfless bird, his fingers running together like the colors of the album’s title. His supporting crew is in tune at every moment (and one mustn’t fail to praise Dan Gottlieb’s drumming in this regard), protecting every melody with passionate detail. This is perfect music for travel, for the music travels itself. It’s a plane ride above a shimmering landscape, a hang-glide over open valleys, a dive into crystal waters—and yet, our feet never leave the ground. One might call it otherworldly, were it not so firmly rooted in the earth in all its glory. Pure magic from start to finish.

<< Collin Walcott: Grazing Dreams (ECM 1096)
>> Julian Priester and Marine Intrusion: Polarization (ECM 1098)

Chick Corea: Solo Piano (ECM 2140-42)

| Tyran Grillo

Corea Solo Piano

Chick Corea
Solo Piano

Chick Corea piano
Ida Kavafian violin
(Children’s Songs, Track 20)
Fred Sherry cello
(Children’s Songs, Track 20)
Release date: March 26, 2010

Much of the jazz that has come to characterize the “ECM sound” is known for its pellucid solemnity. Conversations between sound and space abound, in which vestiges of their own histories mark the passage of time. To younger listeners like myself, it is sometimes easy to forget that the label remains rooted in the youthful immediacy one finds in these formative efforts from Chick Corea. While his refreshing approach to pianism inhabits the same continent as other formidable players, Corea is very much his own culture. Much of the later material that would come to define the “Corea sound,” however, is in clear evidence throughout these discs, and especially in the improvised efforts.

1014 X

Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 (ECM 1014)

Recorded April 21 & 22, 1971, Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: 1971

From note one, these improvisations abound with the freedom of an artist who is ever at his peak. Their many tender touches and nostalgic leanings are shielded by a powerful optimism. Such exuberance makes them all the more embraceable in their poignancy. Tunes such as “Noon Song” twirl like a skirt in the breeze. Others (“Sometime Ago” and “Song For Sally”) are flirtatious and skip from one thought to another: a love in overdrive. The pièce de résistance, however, is the eight-part suite “Where Are You Now?” In this series of “pictures,” Corea renders for us a film whose soundtrack precedes its images. There are no mysterious titles to ponder; each tells us exactly what we are going to hear. The playing is at once pliant and mechanical, carrying across its feelings with such genuine appreciation for the listener that one cannot help but smile.

<< Dave Holland/Derek Bailey: Improvisations for Cello and Guitar (ECM 1013)
>> Jan Garbarek Quintet: Sart (ECM 1015)

1020

Piano Improvisations Vol. 2 (ECM 1020)
Recorded April 21 & 22, 1971, Bendiksen Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: March 1, 1972

This companion volume of Corea’s improvisations doesn’t merely continue where the first left off, but fleshes out finer details unexplored in its neglected depths. This volume is more nocturnal than the last, a siesta in songs without words. “After Noon Song” starts us off alluringly before the crisper interjections of Thelonius Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle” and Wayne Shorter’s “Masqualero.” The second act is where the album begins to fray at the edges, and becomes all the more mystical for it. At first, experiments like “Departure From Planet Earth” seem to stray into unnecessarily weighty territory. Yet with each listen, they tell us more about their travels. And while Corea’s often-discussed religious predilections (I dare not invoke the “S” word here) may give us even greater insight into the music’s enigmatic borders, in this instance such forays into biographical details provide little advantage. Either way, Corea reacclimates into “A New Place.” This is polyglot music, of which each melody its own tongue. Though some are more readily interpretable than others, we always know what is trying to be said.

<< Circle: Paris Concert (ECM 1018/19)
>> Keith Jarrett/Jack DeJohnette: Ruta And Daitya (ECM 1021)

1267

Children’s Songs (ECM 1267)
Recorded July 1983 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: April 1, 1984

By a similar twist of fate that kept me from The Köln Concert for so many years, I only discovered this album recently, and I must say that it deserves a throne alongside Keith Jarrett’s magnum opus for its unfathomable hidden power. Beneath the album’s contemplative veneer beats a furnace of a heart stoked by creative flames, the heights of which are rarely surpassed in today’s genre-hungry climate. Begun in 1971, and recorded here twelve years later, Children’s Songs gives us Chick Corea at his compositional best. At first, the title is an enigma: Are these songs to be played by children or for children? But as we soon discover, the child has already outgrown itself. Like clouds, these pieces take on whatever shapes we project onto them. On the one hand, their steady obbligatos and carefully chosen points of contact resemble the latent energies of Philip Glass (No. 1) and Steve Reich (No. 9). On the other, they pantomime a range of influences, from ragtime to Satie (No. 19 is like something lifted straight out of Gymnopédies) to Bartók (the Mikrokosmos parallels being almost too obvious to mention). One can also clearly see how influential this music must have been to others. The filmic beauty of No. 4 cannot have been lost, for example, on Michael Nyman. These are also pieces about contrast. Take, for example, the left hand in No. 6, which lays out a triadic darkness, while the right hand insists on spinning light before our very eyes. Corea’s characteristic ornaments, as in the descending trill at end of No. 3, grow richer every time, and the sweeping elegies of No. 10, 12, and 13 allow the Corea we know and love to shine through. Violin and cello add delightful pliancy to the “Addendum,” a classically minded closer that puts a stylish bow on an already crisply wrapped package.

Corea and his legacy blossom at every moment throughout these three seminal albums, with which he singlehandedly revitalized the solo piano program as an art form to be taken seriously in the post-Art Tatum era. He is the reliable narrator, the quiet provocateur, and the entertainer. He is also none of these. He bids us to listen without pretense, knowing that a carefully defined surface is nothing without the depth to support it. At the same time, he wastes no time in trying to intellectualize what lies beneath, secure in the knowledge that his music will carry on the conversation. This is an essential collection that belongs on any ECM fan’s shelf, not to mention a prime candidate for reissue of the century.

<< Rainer Brüninghaus: Continuum (ECM 1266)
>> Ulrich P. Lask: Sucht+Ordnung (ECM 1268)

 

Helmut Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (ECM New Series 1858/59)

| Tyran Grillo

The Little Match Girl

Helmut Lachenmann
Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern

Eiko Morikawa Sopran
Nicole Tibbels Sopran
Helmut Lachenmann Sprecher (“Zwei Gefühle”)
Mayumi Miyata shō
Yukiko Sugawara Klavier
Tomoko Hemmi Klavier
Experimentalstudio der Heinrich-Strobel-Stiftung des SWR Elektronische Realisation
André Richard Klangregie
SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart
SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg
Matthias Hermann Musikalische Einstudierung
Sylvain Cambreling Leitung
Recorded July 2003 in Freiburg, Germany

Angst is the necessary form of the curse laid in the universal coldness upon those who suffer of it.
–Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl) is a beguiling, albeit loosely contextualized, redaction of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale of the same name. The girl in question pedals matches on New Year’s Eve before seeking shelter from the cold. She lights one match after another to keep from freezing, fearing her father’s wrath for not having sold any. With every conflagration, she is visited by visions of warmth, sustenance, and love—the last things she ever sees before the climate takes her life. Lachenmann augments this frigid morality tale with other textual sources: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Desire for Knowledge, in which the artist stands before a volcanic chasm, and the writings of Gudrun Ensslin, Red Army Faction reactionary, and acquaintance of Lachenmann’s, who marked her life with fiery eruptions of her own. Each of these figures, marginally marked by forces beyond their control, cowers in its respective hovel, succumbing to the darkest edges of already shadowed words.

What we have in the present recording is the opera’s “Tokyo version,” which, according to the composer, is definitive. Lachenmann’s self-styled “music with images” is beyond meticulous. Its first part is overwhelming and impenetrable, lost in gusts of scrapings, percussive half-statements, and voices doomed to inhabit the borders of incoherence. A dust storm of pops, whistles, skips, whispers, yawns, sighs, shouts, grunts, flutters, clucks and clicks, open-mouthed slaps, and general aphasia shares a lung with an extra-sensory instrumental constituent. Unrealized dreams are its blood, unformed words and broken promises its skin. Speech curls into itself, like a radio dial constantly tuned from one station to the next, an effect only heightened by the presence of electronics. Every sound disguises indecisiveness as ardent exploration, even while achieving that very thing, inhabiting the mouths and heads of its characters, such that human voices and instrumental utterances become so closely allied that often one is hard-pressed to distinguish between the two (and, in fact, feels no need to do so). The drama comes to a head in “Die Jagd” (The Hunt), leading at last to fully articulated speech in “Auf Allen Fenstern” (On Every Window), before a monumental closure. The second part wavers like a flame caressed by frosty winds, hiccups, and choked sentiments. “In Einem Winkel” (At An Angle) provides some startlingly beautiful moments, of a piece with the alchemical precision of Stockhausen and Ligeti at their most meditative. “Zwei Gefühle” (Two Sentiments) gives us the longest stretch of speech, culminating in a prickly crescendo. The opera finishes with a long drone laced with sine waves and counted in time by the rapping of death at our door. Its barely articulated fade is an epilogue to end all epilogues.

One might feel compelled to criticize Das Mädchen as a nervous wreck unsuitable for any self-respecting listener, but the consistency with which it cracks itself open, like a suicidal egg, is so visceral that any negative reactions fall with it to their doom. It transcends the utterance at every turn, dissecting “taboo” into its meaningless phonemes. Like a workout after years of inactivity, it exercises muscles we never even knew we had. Having never seen the opera live, and with only the booklet’s cryptic black-and-whites to go on, I cannot speak with any surety for its potential production value. Suffice it to say that I will be in the front row should the opportunity ever present itself.

Tomasz Stanko: Balladyna (ECM 1071)

| Tyran Grillo

Balladyna

Tomasz Stanko
Balladyna

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Tomasz Szukalski tenor and soprano saxophones
Dave Holland bass
Edward Vesala drums
Recorded December 1975, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

I can only imagine the reactions Tomasz Stanko garnered with Balladyna, his first recording for ECM. The no-holds-barred “First Song” jumps into action with that hard swing that can only come from Dave Holland. Add to this brew the wide-ranging percussion of Edward Vesala and the spicy solos of our frontman and Tomsaz Szukalski, and you have a jambalaya to savor and remember. After such a climactic opener, Stanko could play “Happy Birthday” for all I care. Thankfully (though who knows what this quartet might have done with such ubiquity?) we a get the Ornette Coleman-infused “Tale” that faithfully charts a key transition from raw to cooked jazz. One can feel the rapt attention with which each musician listens to the other.

Original Balladyna
Original cover

This live, interactive energy continues in “Num,” sustained by knitted cymbal work as the two Tomaszes go head to ecstatic head. A killer bass solo makes the cut complete. A lumbering Holland/Stanko interlude opens the door on the title number, anteing up in tutti before spreading its hand into a straight improvisatory flush. Stanko screeches above a pointillist rhythm section, Szukalski stepping into the footprints he leaves behind. A doleful, mocking tone returns in the tongue-in-cheekly titled “Last Song,” nodding like a head succumbing to sleep. The fine horn playing makes this one a standout. The actual last song, “Nenaliina,” is an effusive spring of percussion with a brassy tail.

After all these years, the teeth of Balladyna still make for quite a bite. Anyone wanting to hear the label’s heartbeat in its prime need place an ear to no other chest.

<< Keith Jarrett: Arbour Zena (ECM 1070)
>> Gary Burton Quintet: Dreams So Real (ECM 1072)

Terje Rypdal: After The Rain (ECM 1083)

| Tyran Grillo

ECM 1083

Terje Rypdal
After The Rain

Terje Rypdal electric and acoustic guitars, string ensemble, piano, electric piano, soprano saxophone, flute, tubular bells, bells
Inger Lise Rypdal voice
Recorded August, 1976 at Talent Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Konghaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With an incendiary initiation on Jan Garbarek’s Afric Pepperbird, and after successfully leading far-reaching experiments like his first self-titled project and the plush Whenever I Seem To Be Far Away, Terje Rypdal opened a new door for ECM when he stepped into the studio to record perhaps his most intimate statement to date. In spite of their brevity, the ten tracks on After The Rain flow in a single 38-minute ode to the almost painful depths of life’s greatest joys. Rypdal overdubs every instrument himself, with his then-wife, vocalist Inger Lise, providing the occasional organic touch. Shielded by a holy trinity of intimacy, sincerity, and fearlessness, Rypdal plunges with open eyes into the darkest eddies of his emotional waters. An electric keyboard provides much of the album’s supportive breadth, as in the heavily flanged gem that is “Air.” Rypdal gives us a rare acoustic taste in “Now And Then,” and in “Wind” an even rarer flute solo. The title track breathes in a cloudless sky, Rypdal’s electric cello-like in its weighted grace. Wind chimes complete the illusion of the cover art’s open plain. A string of vignettes, among them the utterly poignant “Little Bell,” leads us to “Like A Child, Like A Song,” bringing its hands together in humble elegy.

Hanging words such as “atmospheric,” “evocative,” or “lyrical” on this Christmas tree would only topple it in a shower of withered needles. One might say the title refers not to the music itself, which if anything feels drenched, but rather to its lingering effects. I sometimes imagine the synthesizer here as a substitute for an unavailable orchestra, the presence of which would have created an entirely different, Eberhard Weber-like, experience. As it is, its sedation lends a potent archival ascendency and distills the soaring solos within. Rypdal’s keening guitar percolates through the album’s semi-porous cloth like sunlight through the veil over a face of one who has seen the world only through the wavering screen of tears, and never in the clarity of day. It is a style of playing that falls even as it rises. At his profoundest moments, Rypdal inspires a humbling lack of vocabulary with which to describe what one hears. In which case, After the Rain is filled with silence.

<< Arild Andersen: Shimri (ECM 1082)
>> Eberhard Weber: The Following Morning (ECM 1084)