ECM Records

Steve Tibbetts: Close (ECM 2858)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Tibbetts
Close

Steve Tibbetts guitar, percussion, piano
Marc Anderson percussion, gongs, handpan, loops
JT Bates drums
Recorded 2021-2024 in St. Paul by Steve Tibbetts
Drums recorded at 8vb Studio, Minneapolis by JT Bates
Mastered by Greg Reierson at Rare Form Mastering
Cover photo: Joel and Norris Tibbetts
An ECM Production
Release date: October 24, 2025

“Music is a twilight language.
The job is to translate some shadow into sound.”
–Steve Tibbetts

On his 11th album for ECM, guitarist Steve Tibbetts returns with his ever-present ally, percussionist Marc Anderson, joined by drummer JT Bates for a session of immense intimacy. If long-standing classics like Exploded View and Big Map Idea have attuned your ears in a certain direction, you can safely put those expectations aside. This time around, Tibbetts offers us imploded views and small map ideas. And while these are meticulously yet organically crafted as per usual, to appreciate their full potential requires meditation, repeat listenings, and an openness to disconnecting oneself from the FOMO of our digital lives in service of something far more subliminal and enduring.

All the more appropriate, then, that the album should take its first steps with “We Begin,” wherein a deep and sinuous sound stretches from horizon to horizon. Like many of the pieces here, it unfolds in multiple numbered parts, each embodying an interlocking experience that builds on the last. In Part 2, for example, the introduction of hand drumming gives traction and earthiness to the proceedings, even as Tibbetts morphs from one register to the next, swapping terrains with the ease of a fox changing the color of its fur without even thinking. The seasons are his compass, trudging through the underbrush as winter approaches. The delicate patter of canine footsteps is audible now and then, marking the forest floor with rhythms older than all of us put together.

In “Away,” another tripartite wonder, hints of distant thunder begin to encroach on our audible view. Without an umbrella, Tibbetts constructs one out of the materials at hand: his strings provide the metal spines, the percussion the webbing between them, and the melodies themselves the rod and handle where they meet. And even though the rain never comes, that’s okay. The beauty was in the anticipation of the downpour.

Not all is ferns and fronds, as “Remember” offers some grittier textures, recalling the solo work of Andy Hawkins. What’s fascinating here is how the title can be read as a metaphor for listening: both require a certain sensitivity to sounds and movements beyond one’s control. There is a sense of flow that exists just outside of time, especially in the piano Tibbetts adds to Part 2, lending an even more nostalgic tinge to the whole.

“Somewhere,” “Anywhere,” and “Everywhere” are something of a triptych in their own right. Consisting mostly of short intakes of breath, they cradle within them the slowest of burns in Part 3 of “Somewhere.” (It’s also a literal burn, as the tubes in Tibbetts’s amp catch fire at the 4’06” mark—listen for their satisfying decay!) Beyond that, one encounters hints of whale song, death knells, and other dark turns, all finding their final rest in “We End.” It’s a flower without a vase, gifted instead to the water’s surface.

Throughout this mellifluous journey, we are guided by two distinct voices. One is the 12-string, which Tibbetts strings in double courses rather than the standard octaves; the other, his acoustic and electric six-strings, on which he drops the low A and E down to G and C, respectively. “There’s always a bass drone available,” he notes of the effect. “That tends to keep all the tunes in the same key. I’m comfortable with that, having spent some time around gamelan ensembles, Tibetan longhorns, court music from Java, Hardangar fiddle from Norway. Most of the world’s music stays in one key or another.” True, and all the more reason to appreciate the yearning, keening quality of his touch. Like the sitar, so much happens after contact has been made.

This is by far the most delicate of Tibbetts’s albums, but for that reason, it speaks more directly to the heart. There is something uniquely tensile here such as only he can articulate. He is a master of suspensions: even in silence, one feels the slack in his gut. The cumulative effect borders on an autonomous sensory meridian response, where the creaking of strings and frets makes the very spine of the universe tingle. A shooting star in slow motion, it possesses time-lapse qualities. And just when you think Tibbetts will lift off and leave you behind, he touches down back on the soil and ensures your safe travels.

Sokratis Sinopoulos/Yann Keerim: Topos (ECM 2847)

| Tyran Grillo

Sokratis Sinopoulos
Yann Keerim
Topos

Sokratis Sinopoulos lyra
Yann Keerim piano
Recorded February 2024
Sierra Studios, Athens
Engineer: Giorgos Kariotis
Cover photo: Jean-Marc Dellac
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

There is nothing quite like the sound of the lyra when Sokratis Sinopoulos takes it in hand. The instrument exhales an ancient soul into the modern air, and few musicians draw from its strings such a fusion of myth and immediacy. From his quartet recordings, Eight Winds and Metamodal, this more intimate duo with pianist Yann Keerim distills their chemistry into an even deeper alchemy of tone and silence. Their collaboration of nearly twenty years has ripened into an art of pure intuition, where melody and freedom speak the same language.

At the album’s heart lies Béla Bartók, whose Romanian Folk Dances serve as both axis and atmosphere. Yet it is in “Vlachia,” one of four original pieces inspired by the Hungarian composer, where their vision truly unfolds, as melancholy and art relate like light through water. The piano’s chords rock gently, a cradle of memory, while the lyra hovers between waking and dreaming, resisting the lull of its own tenderness. “Valley,” by contrast, opens like a watercolor, the soul of the landscape awakening at dawn, when even the smallest stones remember their own luminosity. Between the modally inflected interlude “Mountain Path,” with its blues-tinted horizons, and the quietly breathing “Forest Glade,” the musicians walk among elderly oak, beech, and elm, each exhaling the voices of forgotten peoples, their songs hanging in the air.

The Romanian Folk Dances themselves are reimagined here as meditations on time’s elasticity. “In One Spot,” normally brief and fleeting, becomes a slow unfurling, each phrase examined as though through a magnifying glass instead of a telescope. What was once a dance is now an act of remembrance, a transmission through hands, hearts, and breath. Keerim’s improvisations shimmer with restraint, unveiling the dance as a living organism rather than a set of steps. “Sash Dance” begins like a gift being unwrapped, its introduction a flowering reverie, before the familiar theme emerges, tender as an heirloom passed from parent to child. Sinopoulos’s harmonic touch is radiant, his bow tracing lines that dissolve as soon as they are drawn, while Keerim decorates with the grace of rain gathering on the edge of a leaf.

A solo lyra ushers us into “Dance from Bucsum,” its lament carrying the weight of centuries. Gradually, it finds vitality again, as if memory itself were relearning its steps. The piano’s entrance is light breaking through foliage. “Romanian Polka” delights in this interplay, its bowings and pluckings coaxing the piano into a rhythmic embrace. The music feels rooted in the soil, yet perpetually on the verge of flight. “Fast Dance” is not so much quickened as transfigured. What was once earthy now becomes spectral, its pulse sifted through the mesh between moments.

“Stick Dance” closes the circle, beginning in abstraction before broadening into a spacious terrain of inspiration. There is such reverence here that one hesitates to call it an ending at all. In returning to the first of Bartók’s dances, the album folds time in upon itself, reviving what it has just allowed to rest. It becomes not a conclusion, but a threshold, suggesting that each listening might return us to the beginning with altered ears.

As Sinopoulos and Keerim write in the album’s booklet:

“Our Topos is where tradition meets the present, the Balkan Mountains meet urban space, the music of the countryside meets contemporary creation. Our Topos is where we meet and interact, shaping our individual and common identities.”

Indeed, Topos is less a location than a living field, a place where listening itself becomes part of the composition. Between the lines of melody and silence, we, too, are invited to breathe, to dwell, to remember. And as the final tone recedes, one wonders whether the music has ended at all or merely crossed into another realm, where echoes continue to shape the clouds, unseen but never lost.

Meredith Monk: Cellular Songs (ECM New Series 2751)

| Tyran Grillo

Meredith Monk
Cellular Songs

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble
Ellen Fisher
Katie Geissinger
Joanna Lynn-Jacobs
Meredith Monk
Allison Sniffin
John Hollenbeck
Recorded January-March 2022 / March 2024
Power Station Studios, New York
Engineers: Kevin Killen (2022), Eli Walker (2024)
Assistant: Matthew Soares
Mixing: Eli Walker, Alexann Markus (assistant)
Cover photo: Julieta Cervantes
Recording producers: Meredith Monk and Allison Sniffin with John Hollenbeck
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

All too often, women have been mythologically depicted as vindictive creatures who exist only to distract and destroy. Whether in the Sirens of the ancient Greeks or Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, they sing, weave, and create in isolation, forbidden the pleasures of love, peace, and community. And while the work of singer and composer Meredith Monk has always been concerned with questions of agency, it was never made so clear to me as when the boxed set of her collected ECM recordings materialized in 2022. As the first album to appear since that watershed release, Cellular Songs doesn’t so much continue the journey as fold in upon itself, so that by the end, the listener is left with a compact flower of such potent expressivity that it seems capable of leading one’s ears in directions never thought possible yet which sound intimately familiar, as if remembered from a dream that preceded language.

Cellular Songs is the second part of a trilogy that began with On Behalf Of Nature, a work exploring our global ecosystem from a molecular vantage point. For Monk, the title names what is fundamental not only to life but to all of creation. “What is going on in the cell is so complex,” she writes, “and it’s a prototype of the possibility of what a society could be if you take those same principles and expand them.” As Bonnie Marranca suggests in her liner notes, composing and contemplation are synonymous, which makes Monk a meditator of worlds, one who reduces the act of communication to a microcosmic array of consonants, vowels, and blends. In this regard, it is difficult to imagine anything so biologically poetic as the opening “Click Song #3 Prologue,” in which Monk and her vocal ensemble (Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Joanna Lynn-Jacobs, Allison Sniffin, and Monk herself), with percussionist John Hollenbeck, get to the heart of things. Their tongue clicks are droplets in a distant cave, each carrying minerals and unfelt emotions until, over millennia, stalagmites rise as records of their passage. Like the three “Cell Trios” that follow, they constitute an internal code that locks into place. Flowing harmonies and dissonances encompass the breadth of life itself, a reality in which the voice is central, porous in its itinerant grace. 

Hollenbeck’s vibraphone appears organically in a handful of pieces, a trace element in the soil of this music. Whether documenting a universal grammar in the syllabically potent “Dyads,” playing alongside the piano in “Dive,” or bowing a glassy surface in “Melt,” it allies itself with the building blocks of existence, defying the horrific structures so often fashioned from them. It is the vein in every vocal leaf, seeking photosynthesis without flesh and treating entropy as the dissolution of time. Sniffin’s pianism is equally cathartic in “Lullaby for Lise,” where she joins Geissinger. Rather than leaning on lyricism to seek fantasy, it straddles the threshold between waking and dreaming, recognizing that lived experience is always a blend of both. I hear it as a song to a child not yet born, gestating and growing with all the possibilities of time in her blood and brain, opening her eyes at last in “Generation Dance.” Thus, she comes to know the vision of her mother and her mother’s mother, and as she exhales in “Breathstream,” Monk’s solo voice gives shape to inherited traumas, now able to be wielded in the name of healing.

In the unfolding of “Branching,” each voice becomes the first in an ever-multiplying lineage of wisdom. Speaking of rituals and sacrifices, their repetition serves not as comfort but as a catalyst born of a primeval, generative power. “Passing” finds those same figures trading off vocalizations with a precision that is open to nature’s chaos, while “Nyems” reveals the playfulness of communication for the ephemeral metaphor it truly is.

Given that nearly all of the work presented here is stripped of linguistic meaning, what a radical blessing to encounter the coherence of “Happy Woman.” Here, the feeling is one of transparency, yet also of quiet critique, an awareness of the many roles women inhabit, whether by choice or by force. The opening refrain and its variations (“I’m a happy woman,” “I’m a hungry woman,” “I’m a thinking woman,” etc.) are the stitches of a mother among mothers, quilting herself into the patchwork of history.

By the album’s end, the sacredness of vibration becomes paramount. From these humming atoms emerge animals, rivers, and clouds, leaving us to wonder where the so-called intellect fits into the larger picture. Because if a heartbeat is nothing without silence, then its divisions are where forgiveness begins.

Zehetmair Quartett: Johannes Brahms / op. 51 (ECM New Series 2765)

| Tyran Grillo

Zehetmair Quartett
Johannes Brahms / op. 51

Zehetmair Quartett
Thomas Zehetmair violin
Jakub Jakowicz violin
Ruth Killius viola
Christian Elliott violoncello
Recorded November 2021
Konzerthaus Blaibach
Engineer: Rainer Maillard
Recording supervision: Guido Gorna
Cover photo: Eberhard Ross
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 17, 2025

After much-lauded recordings of works by Hindemith, Bartók, and Schumann, among others, the peerless Zehetmair Quartett returns to ECM to interpret Op. 51 of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). In his liner notes for the album, Wolfgang Stähr characterizes the German composer as one who “wrote both much and little.” Cases in point are his string quartets, of which he quilled over 20 in his youth but later destroyed, leaving only the two featured on this recording, plus a third. As Brahms once related to his biographer, Max Kalbeck, “The boxes with those old manuscripts stood in Hamburg for ages. When I was there two or three years ago, I sat on the floor—entire walls were beautifully decorated with my scores, even the ceiling. I only had to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets. It looked rather good, actually. But I tore it all down—better I do it than someone else!—and burned the rest along with it.” Work on these survivors began in the mid-1860s, but it was only in 1873 that his perfectionism conceded to the decision to call them complete. And so, we are left with, at best, mere intimations of what came before, shattered and reworked into collages of a mind slightly more in tune with its self-inflicted wounds.

The String Quartet No. 1 in C minor blossoms into exuberant life from the start, its gentle lead-in masking an almost volcanic energy beneath. This declamatory statement is not the setting of a tone but the breaking of it, snapping us out of a painful reverie into something more immediate—a real crisis rather than the arbitrary melancholy with which we tend to surround ourselves. The constant vacillation between urgency and resignation renders these proceedings a masterful exercise in tension and release. The sheer level of rhythmic and melodic invention is dazzling to behold, evolving into something beyond incidental. The Zhehetmair Quartett navigates every twist and turn with the precision of a film director who nevertheless allows his actors to make every scene leap from the screen.

Such heroism, however, is destined to fall, for even the romantic gestures of the second movement are not offered in hopes of fulfillment but rather in expectation of being forgotten. This undermining is what separates Brahms from the gigantry of such predecessors as Beethoven. He is uninterested in staid forms and inherited expectations. He speaks and lets his sentiments carry the day, rather than deferring to baskets with pretty little labels and easily identifiable contents.

In the third movement, a subdued yet altogether lively Allegretto, he unveils another facet of determination, all the more powerful for being caught in a web of its own making. A particularly gorgeous moment occurs when the quartet coalesces into a pizzicato dandelion, then blows its seeds far and wide. But if anything is left to wander offscreen, it is brought right back into focus with the final Allegro. Here, the camera zooms in, revealing every detail. It is a stunning conclusion that declares itself undeclarable.

While these quartets are quite violin-forward, as proven by the leading voices of Thomas Zehetmair and relative newcomer Jakub Jakowicz, violist Ruth Killius deserves admiration for providing the rudder that steers both vessels. Her sinewy strength is astonishingly present in the String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, of which the opening movement lets her sing with unbridled lyricism. The same must be said of cellist Christian Elliott, for whom this would be his last recording with the quartet before his untimely death earlier this year. His depth of color and texture is felt throughout, especially in the two central movements, where the instrument’s endurance is revealed in tonal breadth, muscular leaps of intuition, and smooth layers of binding energy.

In the finale, all signatures come to the fore, each a piece in a larger puzzle upon which light continues to fall. The violins are once again declamatory without feeling desperate, pointing instead to inspirations deeply internal and chaotic, funneled into a sound as interlocking as it is yearning to be free of its own design. Thus, the music leaves us behind, not with a sense of closure but of an ongoing trajectory, an arrow still in light. For in Brahms’s hands, drama has no fixed abode, only the upheavals of time itself, to which we all must ultimately succumb and from which, through performances such as this, we momentarily rise again.

Muthspiel/Colley/Blade: Tokyo (ECM 2857)

| Tyran Grillo

Wolfgang Muthspiel
Scott Colley
Brian Blade
Tokyo

Wolfgang Muthspiel guitars
Scott Colley double bass
Brian Blade drums
Recorded October 2024 at Studio Dede, Tokyo
Engineer: Akihito Yoshikawa
Assistant engineers: Ryuto Suzuki and Yo Inoue
Mixing: Michael Hinreiner (engineer), Manfred Eicher, and Wolfgang Muthspiel
Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Cover photo: Juan Hitters
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 26, 2025

For its third studio outing, the trio of guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Brian Blade lays down its most complex and adventurous session yet, fittingly recorded amid the electric calm of its titular city. The band achieves simpatico liftoff from the start in its swinging take on Keith Jarrett’s “Lisbon Stomp.” With a forthright delicacy that is hard to come by these days, they make the music come alive with fluid precision, every note free yet placed right where it needs to be. The plane lands on a more unsettled note with Paul Motian’s “Abacus,” for which Muthspiel slips into echoing distortions for a crunchier sound. Blade taps directly into Motian’s painterly attention to detail, his wider palette eliciting a tactile commentary, while Colley’s solo unpacks every shadow he casts.

Between these two telephone poles, the filaments of Muthspiel’s originals stretch, each charged with varying intensities of voltage. The moods are as distinct as the writing is strong. From the lyrical balladry of “Pradela” to the tongue-in-cheek angularity of “Weill You Wait,” he evokes a spectrum’s worth of times, places, and moods. The latter piece, with its oddly captivating contours, shows just how deeply the guitarist is willing to dive to find his voice.

His wingspan feels broadest when the melody becomes a form of searching, reaching toward something far beyond what the eye can see. This is most evident in “Flight,” which turns the proverbial landscape below into a resonating instrument. Its aerodynamic theme rides one thermal to the next without so much as a wing flap. The blend of acoustic and electric signatures gives the track a rare three-dimensionality.

At just two and a half minutes, “Roll” is the album’s briefest cut but also among its liveliest. With a nod to Weather Report, it radiates that same exuberant sense of living in (and for) the moment. Like the album as a whole, it foregrounds Muthspiel’s talents without stepping on the toes of his bandmates. Colley and Blade are not accompanists but equal protagonists in a story that emerges chapter by chapter into a shared narrative.

“Christa’s Dream” lingers as the most haunting turn, full of transcendence and half-existence, visible yet intangible, like a ghost in the light of day. It gives way to “Diminished and Augmented,” wherein oblique acoustic stylings blossom with playful grace. There’s a hint of Ralph Towner in its balance of leaping precision and sliding ease.

“Traversia” ventures farthest into unconventional harmonies, taking cues from Messiaen’s bold colors while achieving near-Renaissance purity of tone through the use of a capo. Originally written on a children’s guitar, it retains an innocence even as it matures in real time, the arco bass weaving a thread of quiet majesty through it all.

The folk-inspired “Strumming” pays deference to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, refracted through a seamless idiom. Muthspiel’s ember-infused guitar rides atop Blade’s locomotive brushes, creating a boundless sense of space where synthetic and human energies meet. It’s a song of rudimentary joy and quiet surrender, a reminder that sometimes the simplest gestures have the deepest resonance.

In the end, Tokyo feels less like a document and more like a meditation in motion of three travelers translating memories into sound. What Muthspiel, Colley, and Blade achieve here is an equilibrium between structure and spirit. It is jazz as weather: unpredictable, fleeting yet timeless.

Dobrinka Tabakova: Sun Triptych (ECM New Series 2670)

| Tyran Grillo

Dobrinka Tabakova
Sun Triptych

Maxim Rysanov viola
Dasol Kim piano
Roman Mints violin, hurdy-gurdy
Kristina Blaumane violoncello
BBC Concert Orchestra
Dobrinka Tabakova conductor
Fantasy Homage to Schubert, Organum Light, Sun Triptych
Recorded July 2021 at Watford Colosseum
Engineer: Neil Varley
Assistant engineer: Joe Yon
Whispered Lullaby, Suite in Jazz Style, Spinning a Yarn
Recorded August 2020 at Meistersaal, Berlin
Engineer: Rainer Maillard
Mixed January 2025 by Manfred Eicher, Dobrinka Tabakova, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios München
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 26, 2025

British-Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova returns to ECM with her second full program, following String Paths. That 2013 debut left an indelible mark, establishing her voice among many new listeners as one of immense humility intertwined with fortitude. Selections from the album were even included in the films Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) and Le livred’image (The Image Book), both directed by longtime ECM affiliate Jean-Luc Godard. But beyond these connections, it was clear that Tabakova was creating a world unto itself, a parallel dimension of sorts where chance operations and heartfelt intentions danced with graceful strength. All of which leaves someone in my position with the not-so-graceful task of trying to capture the breadth of her sound in the confines of the screen you are reading now. Not coincidentally, she begins her liner note for the present recording as follows: “Writing music and writing about music are distant cousins at best.” And yet, her melodies have a way of bridging the gulf between them with purposeful unfolding.

Violist Maxim Rysanov and pianist Dasol Kim open with two distinct chamber pieces. From the indrawn breath of Whispered Lullaby (2005), the viola opens its octave as a pathway into the piano’s flowering spirit. What starts as a whisper, however, develops into a robust expression of lucidity. Having been originally written for a children’s opera titled Midsummer Magic, it takes on that feeling of an incantation—a clue, perhaps, into its evocative intensity. Suite in Jazz Style (2009) represents the third suite written for Rysanov, following Pirin and Suite in Old Style, the latter of which appeared on String Paths. It’s also a natural homecoming, if you will, for a composer who started her journey as a child improvising on the piano. Its tripartite structure begins with “Talk,” a prime showcase for Rysanov’s mastery that proves him to be one of Tabakova’s most fervent interpreters, having known her since their shared time as students of the Guildhall School. There is a delightful freedom to the interpretation, which, despite its precision (if not because of it), makes the proceedings feel spontaneous. In the interplay between him and Kim, listening and speaking become one in the same.

After this upbeat introduction, “Nocturnal” spreads the charcoal dust of its balladry in thicker strokes. There is, nevertheless, a continuation of that same playfulness, a wry smile in the viola that is self-aware, if now a touch mournful. As the bow travels between sul ponticello and sul tasto gradations, it opens itself to fresh meanings in the piano’s embrace. Kim is the ever-attentive partner, rendering context as faithfully as a saxophonist wandering the streets of a rainy city after a gig. And in “Dance,” which eases into eartshot with percussive tapping, the impulse to move takes on a desire of its own to love and be loved. There is a vibrant microtonal approach here that feels sinewy and thoroughly connected, stepping into folkish territory one moment as easily as it leaps into modernism the next. Rysanov navigates these gymnastics with a rooted sense of architecture, swaying with every tectonic movement to protect the structural integrity at hand.

The Fantasy Homage to Schubert (2005) for strings presents a recontextualization of Schubert’s Fantasy in C major for violin and piano, transfigured and otherworldly. The metaphor is not arbitrarily chosen, either. One could easily imagine it as a lost soundtrack selection from 2001: A Space Odyssey, each shift of light and celestial body revealing both the alien and the familiar. Tempting as it is, I hesitate to call this “haunting,” as this would imply there was someone around to be haunted. Rather, it feels disembodied, having nowhere to go but outward, forever echoing into the depths of the universe. And yet, somehow, we are privy to its secrets. The appearance of violin and cello (soloists Nathaiel Anderson-Frank and Benjamin Hughes, respectively) is a slow-motion transmission from an extinct Earth finding its way to us in hypersleep.

Organum Light (2000), also for strings, places Tabakova at the helm of the BBC Concert Orchestra. Originally for five singers, it takes its inspiration from the viol consort pieces of Gibbons and Purcell. Despite a deep, rich pulse, sliding harmonics in the strings open our hearts to its truths.

Spinning a Yarn (2011) for solo violin and hurdy-gurdy features its dedicatee, Roman Mints, on both instruments. A ligament between past and future, it leaves us to walk the present on the resulting tightrope. The playful unpredictability of the hurdy-gurdy provides a tactile foundation for the violin’s storytelling. All of it feels incidental to some scene from centuries ago brought to life in moving pictures. One can almost see the fields being planted, the animals being kept, the children being raised. It also has a rocking motion that makes its consonances sing all the more sweetly.

Last is the album’s title piece for violin, violoncello and string orchestra. Composed in 2007, it first took life as “Dawn,” which Tabakova wrote for the 10th anniversary of Kremerata Baltica and in celebration of Gidon Kremer’s 60th birthday, later adding two further movements. Mints is retained here alongside cellist Kristina Blaumane, fronting the BBC Concert Orchestra under the composer’s hand. The sheer depth of sonority is wondrous, at once frightening and comforting. “Day” is an arpeggiated crystal of which each facet reveals a slightly different perspective. A Philip Glass-like architecture opens itself to adventurous harmonies, ending in a hush that slides without pause into “Dusk.” Here, the mood is more meditative, stretched to reveal the spaces in between the notes. Even in slumber, it knows the sun will return to give life once again, even if there is no one around to enjoy it.

At the end of her liner note, Tabakova writes: “I’d like to think that in the silence that follows music, there may be a fleeting sense that the internal world has spoken – not in certainty, but in presence, however fragile or incomplete.” And if there is anything to be found in the silence that follows this album, it is surely the need to fill it once again with what we have just heard, lest the linearity of time remind us that, one day, we will all stop singing.

John Taylor: Tramonto (ECM 2544)

| Tyran Grillo

John Taylor
Tramonto

John Taylor piano
Marc Johnson double bass
Joey Baron drums
Concert recording, January 2002
CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Engineer: Curtis Schwartz
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
An ECM Production
Release date: September 19, 2025

As a dedicated ECM listener, few things excite me as deeply as seeing a neglected catalog number filled (in this case, 2544) and the unvaulting of an archival recording from a musician no longer with us. To have both in one release is a cause for rejoicing. 

Pianist John Taylor (1942-2015) has a storied history on ECM, having made his label debut on 1977’s Azimuth with Norma Winstone and Kenny Wheeler, and since appearing on projects with John Surman, Peter Erskine, and Jan Garbarek, among others. The present recording, captured live in January of 2002 at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham during a Contemporary Music Network Tour, predates the classic Rosslyn with the same trio by only a few months. In fact, “Between Moons” is shared between the two. The bandleader’s ballad walks amiably from shadow to streetlight, letting its thoughts wander as they will to places and people yearned for. With a tenderness only visible behind closed eyes, it slides into delicate propulsions without a hint of force.

Yet it’s in “Pure and Simple,” another Taylor original, where the concert begins by throwing us into the deep end. The title is an ironic one, as there’s nothing pure and simple about it. This chameleonic tune changes colors and faces at the drop of a hat, dancing its way through a gallery of scenes, influences, and moods. The interplay is cosmically telepathic, treating every shift as a stage of development in an organism that still feels like it’s growing all these years later. Johnson manages to both stay within the lines and leap beyond them with great joy, while Baron anticipates every move with fluid precision.

Steve Swallow’s “Up Too Late” is the set’s juicy center. An epic romp through boppish territory, it finds Taylor exuberantly balancing play and rigor. Despite the robustness of its dramaturgy, there’s a masterful restraint that holds its own in the first act before the keyboard unleashes a deluge of liberation. This inspires Baron to unpack his snare like a bag of rattlesnake eggs as Taylor defenestrates his allegiance to form and Johnson sings through his arco vibrato.

The title track by Ralph Towner, first heard with its composer and Gary Peacock on 1994’s Oracle, brings us back to center with Johnson plucking by his lonesome before Taylor emotes his way into frame. The resulting carpet is unfurled one careful turn at a time, a plush and forgiving surface on which to travel toward the 15-minute juggernaut that is Taylor’s “Ambleside.” Opening with finger-dampened strings and percussive tapping, it courts us with understated allure before the theme introduces itself forthrightly. The resulting groove inspires playful turns from all concerned. Baron is on point with his hand drumming, leading the trio into a most delicate and ethereal finish.

Fans of Taylor shouldn’t even hesitate to make this album a part of their collection.

Arvo Pärt: And I heard a voice (ECM New Series 2780)

| Tyran Grillo

Arvo Pärt
And I heard a voice

Vox Clamantis
Jaan-Eik Tulve conductor
Recorded 2021/22
at Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia
Engineer: Margo Kõlar
Cover: Fidel Sclavo
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 5, 2025

For we [are] strangers before thee, and sojourners, as [were] all our fathers: our days on the earth [are] as a shadow, and [there is] none abiding.
–1 Chronicles 29:15

Building on more than 25 years of working alongside Arvo Pärt (whose relationship with producer Manfred Eicher spans nearly twice that length), Vox Clamantis and conductor Jaan-Eik Tulve present a new recording of choral works drawn from sacred texts. Their last recording, The Deer’s Cry, was a watershed moment in the Estonian composer’s discography, as it simultaneously narrowed the frame and opened up wider possibilities of interpretation.

Although the program is varied in direction, it is wholly centered around a theme of humility, and nowhere more so than in the opening Nunc dimittis (2001). Its setting of Luke 2:29-32 tells the story of Simeon, who holds the baby Jesus in his arms, knowing that God’s promise to see Christ revealed before his death has been fulfilled. What begins as an intimate supplication, however, turns into a vast theological chordscape of meditations on the openness of God’s grace freely given to all. What is so striking about the voices is not only the shapes through which Pärt guides them in the score but also the depth of power in their fragility. When alone, they waver ever so slightly; when aligned with others, they fix their gazes heavenward. 

O Holy Father Nicholas (2021), taken from the Orthodox Prayer Book, was written for the opening of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at Ground Zero in New York City. Like the Bible itself, its covers grow worn with time; words wear off from handling yet remain unchanged, living and without contradiction. In seeking intercession, the choir allows the light of forgiveness to shine upon human depravity. The singing walks two distinct paths, each passing through like a pilgrim to destinations promised yet unseen. Such tensions reveal the shape of our sin, beautiful from a distance but gnarled and festering at close inspection. This contrast is a sobering one that places life at the center of an infinitely complex structure, of which belief lays the cornerstones.

Each of the Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen (1988), recently heard arranged for strings on Tractus, speaks to a different manifestation of Christ. From the tender “O Weisheit” (O Wisdom) to the highs of “O Schlüssel Davids” (O Key of David), a full range of vocal and incarnational possibilities is examined through the lens of sound. Buried among them is “O König aller Volker” (O King of All the People), in which rhythmic circles reveal caesurae for glory to slip through like a quiet legion of angels. The stepwise movements that characterized the Nunc dimittis are to be found here in denser but no less translucent configurations.

Für Jan van Eyck (2019) is a rendering of the liturgical Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) based on the same section of the Berliner Messe and written for the restoration of the altarpiece of the van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, which was reopened in the Ghent Cathedral. Accompanied by Ene Salumäe on organ, it allows us a spell of awe before the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice. So begins a sequence of shorter yet no less rich works that continues with Kleine Litanei (2015), which pays respect to Irish Benedictine monk, theologian, and philosopher St. Virgil (c. 700-784). Its fragments of traditional prayers shift between harmony and dissonance, evoking the tension of seeking spiritual comfort in a secular world. Last is the album’s title composition, And I heard a voice… (2017). It is, so far, the only Scripture that Pärt has set in his mother tongue. Based on Revelation 14:13, it concludes appropriately on an eschatological note, where the promise of eternal rest—a life without pain and suffering—is offered amid the wrath of the end times, leaving us with a most undefiled sense of hope.

Faith is not determined by the strength of one’s convictions but rather by the truth and integrity of what it worships. We can assert all the faith in the world in thin ice, but it will inevitably crumble beneath our feet. By the same token, we can have little faith in thick ice, and it will hold as we make our way safely across. Much of that truth comes alive in this music. As Christ says in Luke 17:6, “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.” Let these choral works each be a mustard seed waiting to be watered by the listener’s tender regard.

Rolf Lislevand: Libro primo (ECM New Series 2848)

| Tyran Grillo

Rolf Lislevand
Libro primo

Rolf Lislevand archlute, chitarrone
Recorded 2022-23
at Moosestudios, Evje, Norway
by Rolf Lislevand
Mixed October 2024
by Manfred Eicher, Rolf Lislevand, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
at Bavaria Musikstudios
Cover photo: Fidel Sclavo
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Rolf Lislevand
Release date: August 29, 2025

Nearly a decade after his last appearance on ECM, early music specialist Rolf Lislevand returns to the New Series with another solo program, shifting focus now from the court of Louis XIV to 17th-century Italy. The album’s title is a nod to Il libro primo, a musician or writer’s first volume of works that, as Lislevand notes in the album’s booklet, “can often hold the most inspired and radical creations of an artist.” Like the more formalized Opus primum, it carries a certain creative charge, affording listeners a glimpse into the artist’s most foundational thoughts in a realm of lively experimentation and recalibration of existing rules.

It’s also an exciting realm to explore for proving that the lutenist’s repertoire is far more vast and varied than the fairweather listener may mistake it to be. Take, for example, the program’s two opening works by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger (c. 1580-1651) and Giovanni Paolo Foscarini (c. 1600-1647). Whereas the former’s Toccata terza greets the dawn like eyelashes fluttering into wakefulness, the latter’s Tasteggiata is its nocturnal other, revealing a strikingly modern atmosphere that Lislevand likens to the French impressionists and even to Carla Bley. Neither characterization is misplaced, given the improvisational elements incorporated into the present renderings, which allow for something ethereally raw to spring forth.

And what of the fantastical arpeggios that open Kapsberger’s Toccata sesta, added by Lislevand and seemingly drawn from the same well? In them is the promise of life and love, all unraveled with a meticulous sort of freedom. The mid-tempo feel of Kapsberger’s Toccata quinta strikes that same balance of flourishing and nourishing, never letting go of the Baroque’s architectural sensibilities.

A highlight is the Corrente con le sue spezzate of Bernardo Gianoncelli (d. c. 1650). Despite being the latest work on the program in terms of publication, dating to the end of his life, it is a veritable flower of a tune. With a clear bass line as pistil and sparkling ornamentations as petals, it sways to the wind of Lislevand’s organic touch. It also epitomizes the nuove musiche approach of the times, which went against the polyphonic grain of the Renaissance by favoring deeper rhythmic interplays through which staid motifs were recontextualized. One might liken such a movement to Hollywood’s propensity to remake its own cultural products, an impulse that (profit motives aside) points to the seemingly universal need to repackage the past in the aesthetics of the new so that audiences can connect to the same emotional content on more immediately relatable terms. 

Thoughtful inclusions are to be found in two Recercadas by Diego Ortiz (c. 1510-1576). Despite their spatial and temporal differences, Lislevand places Ortiz and Kapsberger on the same shelf for their syncopations and expressive colorations. Each spins increasingly complex relationships from deceptively simple beginnings, growing fractally with every reiteration.

Yet the pinnacle for me is Lislevand’s original Passacaglia al modo mio, which is at once a distillation and loving expansion of the passacaglia form. It combines many of the elements found in its surroundings, including a robust “left hand” in the bass and a lithe “right hand” in the overlying melody. It also changes faces multiple times from start to finish, its improvisational layers paying homage to Barbara Strozzi, Bach, Beethoven, and Keith Jarrett. All the while, it maintains a haunting sense of familiarity, especially in the concluding progression, which invites us into its circularity like a child comforted by a mother’s embrace.

Special mention must be made of the recording, captured in a barn in northern Norway by Lislevand himself, engineered by Michael Hinreiner, and mixed by both Lislevand and Hinreiner alongside producer Manfred Eicher in Munich. Although the archlute is primary, some of the pieces originated on the Baroque guitar and chitarrone (or theorbo), which is also played here and distinguished by its darker, more rounded tone. Instead of enveloping these instruments in a wash of artificial sound, the reverb draws out their inner essence with tasteful details of wood and strings.