Roscoe Mitchell: Nine To Get Ready (ECM 1651)

May 13, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

Roscoe Mitchell saxophones, flute, vocal
Hugh Ragin trumpet
George Lewis trombone
Matthew Shipp piano
Craig Taborn pianos
Jaribu Shahid basses, vocal
William Parker double-bass
Tanni Tabbal drums, percussion, vocal
Gerald Cleaver drums
Recorded May 1997 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Nine To Get Ready realizes a leap of intuition for saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and his Note Factory ensemble. The influential Art Ensemble of Chicago veteran observes structure in even the freest settings and activates that structure with convulsive possibility. Taking his previous collaborations with Evan Parker as litmus, we find in Mitchell’s approach to composition a like-spirited feeling of bridled spontaneity. Yet if those two unforgettable sessions represented the breaking of new ground, this one enacts a finer sifting of its upturn.

The mysterious “Leola” opens in goopy meditation and perhaps shifts expectations to another plane entirely. From a slow draw it liquefies the pips on playing cards and scrambles them until a royal flush of reflective art takes form. From this Mitchell deals as potent a hand as one could imagine, introducing us to the post-AEC developments he has so meticulously sustained. Here is a scene where sunlight peaks out from overcast Byzantine sky with all the weight of a dictionary compressed into a single utterance. Like the mouth rounded in preparation, its textures work in a symphony of muscle and air. As the atmosphere builds up the depth of its green, trills add fresh movement to an implied and fragrant biosphere. Here is the power of imagination, kneaded until the grammar of brass is personified even as it is depoliticized.

If the Parker comparison feels arbitrary, then through “Dream And Response” it finds purchase in Mitchell’s remarkable sopranism, which lends mysticism also to the silver chain of “Hop Hip Bip Bir Rip.” At once sibilant and razor-edged, it carves as it sings. The beauty of the former piece—and by extension of Mitchell’s sound-world on the whole—is that dream and response are one and the same. Like a nighttime vision it implies a vast and impenetrable backdrop, a sphere of myriad voices. The late Lester Bowie gets prime dedication in “For Lester B.” This gorgeous, slow swing through galactic travels is all the more poignant for trumpeter Hugh Ragin’s soulful approach. Couched in a loving cluster, he casts a bronze of stark quality. A shaded bass solo reaches a hand heavenward and pulls down a projection screen, across which flits a gallery of memories.

To offset the bitter sweetness of it all, Mitchell reveals a clear and golden tone in “Jamaican Farewell.” In the presence of his buttery textures and delectable intonation, the entrance of piano resounds with oceanic current and stuffs plenty of beauty into the naysayer’s pipe. The title track is another soprano feat, circular and intense. Here is also where the doubled backing trio reveals its many-chambered heart. Drummers Tanni Tabbal and Gerald Cleaver, bassists Jaribu Shahid, and pianists Matthew Shipp and Craig Taborn match the speed and tone of every phoneme in a Jacob’s Ladder of overzealous diphthongs. They are both the underlying soil and the fresh pavement atop it. Highlights abound further in “Bessie Harris.” This more straightforward morsel whirls until it spends itself in pure goodness. Phenomenal playing from Mitchell moves the spirit in Ragin’s thin-lipped solo, and bids both drummers to speak. After the insightful experiment in reanimation that is “Fallen Heroes” (featuring Mitchell on flute), the ensemble ends with two shorter tracks, “Move Toward The Light” and “Big Red Peaches,” the latter spinning a Tom Waits-like coda.

We can speak of this music all we like, but by the end it has spoken of us.

<< Selected Signs, I: An ECM Anthology (ECM 1650)
>> Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge – Keller Quartett (ECM 1652 NS)

Eleni Karaindrou: Eternity and a Day (ECM New Series 1692)

May 13, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

“Open always, always watching, the eyes of my soul.”
–Dyonisios Solomos

The Film
An ancient city, lost beneath the ocean. The stuff of history. Time, a young voice tells us, is “a child playing jacks on the beach.” A piano wafts through the image like a breeze carrying scents and sounds of retrospection—the film’s leitmotif. Here the past functions not as a repository for memory but as a palimpsest for a mind still practicing. It is the mind of Alexander (Bruno Ganz), an aging poet whose dark trench coat cuts a crow’s wing against director Theo Angelopoulos’s wintry palette. A slow approach to a window guides us to the film’s title by way of Alexander’s boyhood. The camera follows him as if through a ghost’s eyes.

When we first encounter Alexander as he is now, he holds a taste of the sea in his mouth…

…and clutches his throat as if breathing were a labor. This momentary inability to get words out is both curse and blessing: an obvious malady for a man of letters, but also a release from the world’s imploration to dress its dreariness in pretty semantics.

The sea follows Alexander. It is the tail of the dying comet that is his life. His dog looks toward that same sea, a place where music and memory are engaged in dance. A terminal diagnosis looms over him (his constant pill-popping brings rhythm to the narrative), mist over a landscape of uneven hills. He feels silence encroaching and fills it with regrets of unfinished work, of “words scattered here and there.”

Alexander welcomes a boy (Achileas Skevis)—an Albanian vagrant washing windows at stoplights for petty cash—into his car. His whim begins a final poem, a magnum opus borne of action and sacrifice that can never manifest as ink and paper but rather unspools across light and film. Yet while this charity saves the boy from capture by police and gives us the film’s first smile, it comes at the cost of ignoring the other boys into whose meager routine of survival he had fallen.

Alexander knows the ripple effect of his actions. He feels the churning waters of time as a swallowing force. Its life-giving properties are so far removed from the here and now that it is all he can do to plunge his feet into the mud of recollection. After spending a lifetime waiting for progress, he will spend another waiting for regress. Angelopoulos’s title does not compare eternity and a day, but equates them.

As Alexander prepares to leave his everyday existence and spend his remaining days in convalescence, he brings the dog to his daughter, Katerina (Iris Chatziantoniou). The contrast between her upscale apartment and her utter yearning for a transparent ancestry are but surface to the inner sanctum of her father’s raw linguistic materials. She displays her anxieties among the art objects of her living room, where a wall catches the circumference of a projected clock. As the film’s symbol par excellence, it hovers like a dedication page torn from its binding and pasted where a window might be. In this manner Katerina turns her glitches into quantifiable space.

During this visit we learn that Alexander is completing an unfinished 19th-century epic by Dyonisios Solomos. “The Free Beseiged,” as it is known, is mired in the Greek War of Independence, from which it draws blood to fill its pen. Alexander has been working on the project since the death of his wife, Anna (Isabelle Renauld), who comes to us in flashbacks. And while Katerina may not understand why her father would ever wish to graft his words onto another’s, she flows through him like the returning sea when he gives her letters written in her mother’s hand. Through her reading, Alexander is read anew, revitalized as if by the boy whose fate he has influenced.

The sea is a trance, pillow of scent-filled houses. Sleep and silence cohabit its ever-changing shoreline. Through her daughter’s voice, a resurrected Anna links newfound maternity with love, safety, and breath. The vulnerability of her body engenders absolute trust in, and safety for, her blossoming child. For Katerina is indeed a flower, the center of a family gathering in the sunlit prime of a warmer era. Even in life, Anna was constantly on the verge of dissolving, a wanderer in love. Alexander is moved beyond comfort, for he knows that his dissolution will bring him closer.

Like all reveries, this one is all the more poignant for its brevity and it is Katerina’s husband who breaks its spell. Put off by the presence of what in his eyes can be nothing more than a haggard vagabond, he tells Alexander he has sold the old house by the sea—the very house where Katerina tumbled into maturity—and that it will be demolished. He also takes unkindly to animals and questions any obligation to welcome the dog into his home.

The streets, paved in articulate indifference, keep Alexander in check. They are the insignia of a publisher far grander than anything he can contemplate with his ties to speech. In opening himself to a stranger, Alexander realizes he has found in the boy a beacon—not of hope, but of evenness. This balance is upset when he witnesses the boy being thrown into the back of a cargo truck.

He follows the vehicle to a shady warehouse where other urchins have been plucked from their rocks and are being sold into an invisible market. The boys, however, are wise to this and make a run for it in a ballet of quick thinking and broken glass.

In the ensuing chaos, Alexander saves the boy of his interest, giving all the money on his person in exchange. He puts the boy on a bus going toward the Albanian border, both in the hopes of losing him before he loses himself and in the hopes that there might be a home to return to.

The boy comes back to Alexander, having found a home in presence of the bearded stranger. He sings a children’s song from his homeland, tells Alexander of crossing the border, thereby revealing a likeminded fixation on language. Alexander takes him to the border, but they run when the boy tells him he has no one.

Alexander tells him the story of the poet Solomos (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), Greek but raised in Italy, who returned to his homeland when he heard the Greeks were rising against the Ottomans. He does not speak the language, and so he buys words from the locals. Across a night “sown with magic” he travels, reaching deep into his reservoir of sentiments to produce the “Hymn to Liberty.” It remains a significant verse for Alexander, a bid for freedom from language, through language.

In the end, he entrusts the dog to his housekeeper, Urania (Helene Gerasimidou), interrupting her son’s wedding to do so. Spectators hanging from the gates mirror those at the border, each a living puppet frozen in the wake of a changing tide.

This leaves the boy, Alexander’s only link, his only mirror. “You’re smiling, but I know you’re sad,” the boy tells him. Such contradictions—in the end, not really contradictions at all—are essential to Angelopoulos’s cinematic world, a world where light and dark are so permeable as to be unquestionable. For while Alexander’s cape is the shadow of his deteriorating self, of a body blurring into lifelessness, it is also a flag whose communication harnesses wind like a sail.

He is a man devoid of contact, yet who is touched by humanity; a man in self-imposed exile, yet who knows the landscape as if it were his own; a man known for words, yet who pays for them with emotional currency. The boy wants to say goodbye, but Alexander convinces him to stay, will not accept that his hand may bring about another end.

Thus the camera looks beyond the curtain into the reflecting pool of the human condition.

His films are unfinished, stitched yet tattered. In allowing their seams the privilege of coming undone, he delivers messages devoid of hyperbole. The zoom, for example, sheds its derivative qualities in such a context, seeking not to focus our attention so much as to remind us of limitations. As in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the occasional close-up shocks with its candor, reaches into the pit of our complacency and stirs up the love we have forgotten. When Alexander turns his back on us, he turns his back on the world.

The Soundtrack
Composer Eleni Karaindrou has her finger so firmly on the pulse of Angelopoulos’s ethos that her flesh has melded with his images. Yet there is something more than the combination of sight and sound going on in Eternity and a Day, for this more than any other film she has soundtracked is an ode also to time.

Eleni Karaindrou
Eternity and a Day

Vangelis Christopoulos oboe
Nikos Guinos clarinet
Manthos Halkias clarinet
Spyros Kazianis bassoon
Vangelis Skouras french horn
Aris Dimitriadis mandolin
Iraklis Vavatsikas accordion
Eleni Karaindrou piano
String Orchestra La Camerata Athens
Loukas Krytinos director
Recorded March and April 1998, Athens Concert Hall
Engineer: Andreas Mantopoulos and Christos Hadjistamou
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The title of the first piece, “Hearing the Time,” would seem to say as much: just as Angelopoulos puts an eye to lens, so too Karaindrou puts an ear to history. She draws thick yet airy wool over our eyes, that we might view the world through the blur of fibrous experience. Over an expanse of archival strings we hear a distant relay between violin and accordion. These punctuations are not ruptures but voices from below. The composer at the keyboard elicits “By the Sea,” a humid snapshot that segues us into the mandolin accents and silken oboe line of the “Eternity Theme.” As Beethovenian cellos churn, we think back to its corresponding scene in the film, in which we find Alexander listening to this very music on the radio. He shuts off his mechanical translator and looks out across to the other apartment complex, where the same music flows from another window. “Lately” he muses, “my only contact with the world is this stranger opposite who answers me with the same music.” Perhaps true to character, he decides against pursuing this fascination: “It’s better not to know…and imagine.”

And imagine is all we can do when taking this soundtrack on its own terms. The theme echoes throughout its architecture, inflected differently by each soloist. A bassoon evokes tears colored by fate, while clarinets drip from the great beyond with tastes of once-forgotten joy. A traditional wedding dance fills the air with bright steps, contrasting almost painfully with the solitude of “Bus,” and lends relative sanctity to Ganz’s recitation in “The Poet.” Yet it is in a little piece called “Borders” that the fluidity of his embodiment is clearest. Through it we realize that harmony needs change.

Like the film itself, the score of Eternity and a Day creates a somewhere far removed from its content yet which is equally cinematic. It is a looking glass unto itself, a kaleidoscope named “then.”

<< Kenny Wheeler: A Long Time Ago (ECM 1691)
>> Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: Drawn Inward (ECM 1693)

Ken Hyder’s Talisker: Land Of Stone (JAPO 60018)

May 12, 2013 | Tyran Grillo

Ken Hyder’s Talisker
Land Of Stone

Ken Hyder drums
John Lawrence bass
Marcio Mattos bass
Davie Webster alto saxophone
John Rangecroft tenor saxophone, clarinet
Ricardo Mattos soprano and tenor saxophones, flute
Brian Eley vocals
Frankie Armstrong vocals
Phil Minton vocals
Maggie Nichols vocals
Recorded April 1977 in London
Engineer Martin Wieland
Produced by Thomas Stöwsand

Over a career spanning more than four decades, Scottish percussionist and vocalist Ken Hyder has developed a strong body of work, though perhaps none so robust as his Talisker outfit. Combining Celtic and jazz influences, Talisker debuted in 1975 with Dreaming Of Glenisla on Virgin Records. Yet as Hyder’s musical interests began to expand to traditional Irish music and further to Asian monasticism, his sound opened itself to a world of possibilities. Enter album the second, Land Of Stone, which found a home on the JAPO label two years later.

“The Strathspey King,” a strangely swinging ode to Scottish master fiddler James Scott Skinner (1843-1927), sets a homegrown tone. Clarinetist John Rangecroft proves to be a vital presence in this increasingly enigmatic session, adding swagger aplenty. Like a young hopeful decked out in fresh threads and money in the pocket, he tricks the heart into thinking that harm is a while away. Hyder’s militaristic drum solo intercepts street-side, as if offering free samples of reality before a chorus of bidders drops into view with its haunting brand of Hebridean choral music in “The Men Of Barra Know How To Drink, But The Women Know How To Sing.” A boisterous and colorful chain, its syllables become actions, teetering like drunken instruments into “Close The Window And Keep It Down.” This likeminded island song is an onomatopoetic excursion into the inner lives of house wares and propriety. The latter quickly disintegrates as bonds loosen their friction and slide from grasp in screeching ululations, courtesy of ECM margin-bearer Maggie Nichols. The color wheel darkens further in “See You At The Mission, Eh, If It’s No’ Full,” in which a brood of instruments strains unison phrasings through an upturned colander. Bass and drums form a knot of support, eyes in a flowing wood grain. In the wake of these dirt-caked fingernails, “Derek Was Only A Bairn” rides into the dawn, a smooth caravan lead by Ricardo Mattos on flute and horse’s trot.

Hyder insists that improvisation was a vital component of Scottish bagpipe playing, and in a tripartite pibroch he explores the crossover from the Highlands to the fringes of American free jazz, dedicating parts respectively to the MacCrimmons (a notable family of pipers), John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler. After a microscopic dialogue between bassists John Lawrence and Marcio Mattos, soprano saxophone masquerades as bagpipe in piercing shepherd’s call. Hints of a jig rise and fall from deeper drones, a sky behind mountain silhouettes. Over the click of cymbal, dense voices weave in and out of earshot, taking solid presence in the loam of memory, to slumber and to molt. The banshees return with gentle persuasions, their ashen hair and earthward grins blistered by the rub of their limbo. Yet with the coming of rhythm they achieve communication somewhere on the other side of fear, ecstatic totems each passing through sea and grain until the wind puts fingers to lips and blows.

Cleaning off the dust of age, Talisker shakes out tunes old and new, and with the chaff pieces together charcoal fields as would a cobbler hammer a sole. Or is it soul? There’s plenty to be had in this land of stone.

Dominique Pifarély/François Couturier: Poros (ECM 1647)

March 23, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

Poros

Dominique Pifarély violin
François Couturier piano
Recorded April 1997, Festburgkirche, Frankfurt
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Dominique Pifarély—violinist and former co-leader of clarinetist Louis Sclavis’s acclaimed Acoustic Quartet—and pianist François Couturier—who since Anouar Brahem’s Khomsa has recorded a string of varied albums for ECM—team up for this unique collaboration. The resulting admixture of folk and modern classical influences finds the duo charting waters that might have otherwise remained glassy and still without the cut of their oars. The image is no mere metaphor, for the album’s title comes from French philosopher Sarah Kofman, who characterizes the concept in precisely these oceanic terms: a path through aquatic expanse that is just as vulnerable to erasure as it is to discovery. Its trailblazing implications rest on a blade of uncertainty, and therein lies their beauty.

One might be hard-pressed, however, to read any of this into the music in the absence of such a setup. The listener is instead confronted with a tantalizing, if restless, chain of events. “Trois images” awakens in a fit of pique, only to realize that the object of its scorn has already fallen away like the house of cards that is any dream. The musicians seem to run frantically trying to rebuild it before it gives up the ghost of reality. In other pieces like “Retours,” “Vertigo,” and the title piece we encounter an even more gnarled grammar. It is a dialectical assemblage of action and thought, of secrecy and exposition. The album is a constellation of references whose stars belie hues of the French modernists, free improvisation, and Bartók, among others. We therefore never rest for too long on one idea. The occasional locks stand out for their beauty, only to drown in a sea of cat cries prancing into blackout. What with the bubbling streams of “Labyrintus” and the grinding gears of “La nuit ravie” there is far more going on below and within, locked away behind a shell of almost ritual design. Pifarély brings the occasional jazzy inflection to the arc of his swing, most notably in Mal Waldron’s “Warm Canto” (from his 1961 album, The Quest), in which he blends tiptoeing pizzicato into explosive resonant chords in a chromatic whirlwind. “Gala” offers a pileated ending.

As on the album’s cover, the duo crosshatches incidentals in a knitted bruise. Pifarély trembles with the motion of a leaf obsessed with the fear of falling. His attention to detail and the precision of his agitations are thus remarkable. Couturier’s intricate astrology calls strangely from below, goading that leaf into decomposition. Only then do we see that the forest has been there all along, tilting, spinning, blurring into a looming mask of greens and browns. Traction is hard to come by, paths invisible. Our mind becomes the score, the stand on which its pages are turned, the sound dying to be released from within it. In thinking we believe, and in believing we know.

<< Giya Kancheli: Trauerfarbenes Land (ECM 1646 NS)
>> Michael Mantler: The School Of Understanding (ECM 1648/49)

OM with Dom Um Romao (JAPO 60022)

March 22, 2013October 31, 2013 | Tyran Grillo

OM with Dom Um Romao

Urs Leimgruber soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet
Christy Doran 6- and 12-string electric guitars
Bobby Burri bass
Fredy Studer drums
Dom Um Romão percussion, berimbau
Recorded August 1977 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Thomas Stöwsand

Is there a high road? This is the question asked by OM’s third of four albums for JAPO. For its junior effort, the renegade quartet of Urs Leimgruber (reeds), Christy Doran (guitar), Bobby Burri (bass), and Fredy Studer (drums) would seem to hold to a relatively accessible doctrine. But while it is the most groove-oriented in their potent discography—not surprising, given the driving center found in guest artist Dom Um Romão (1925-2005)—the core provided by the legendary Brazilian jazz drummer and percussionist, known for his work with Weather Report, allows a melodic brand of expressive freedom to take shape. The showdown is just as dreamy and feverish as anything OM had ever produced. This atmosphere comes about through the hypnotic effect of a steady pulse, the essence of all ritual. Burri’s “Chipero” opens the doors to a realm of bird and goddess, a forest where waters run shallow but sure. Romão provides the welcoming call, the rest evoking fauna and wounds of expectation. These energies sustain themselves throughout, especially in the two Doran-penned tunes. “Back To Front” swings us farther out into the cosmic stretch by way of some especially colorful picking from the composer, unwrapping a package of candy and strewing its contents over Saturn’s rings. The flow is not without its detours, as evidenced by the stark change of scenery as bass and guitar mellow for a concluding night flight. Doran’s other half is “De Funk,” which churns the butter to even smoother consistency. Romão’s Nana Vasconcelos vibe adds just the right touch of salt to Studer’s metronome. Doran, ebullient as over, can only defer to Burri, who works overtime to keep us in the here and now. Leimgruber’s bass clarinet turns like a jigsaw piece crying for fit and sets up a round of witty exchanges. Nestled among these propulsive journeys, the artful dodge of Leimgruber’s “Dumini” awakens the behemoth of memory in a lanky, sweltering pitch. Because it is the only track to have made the cut for OM’s retrospective album, this collaborative joint is worth checking out for the surrounding paths it lays. OM remains attentive to ebb and flow, an oarless boat reaching shore. What does oxygen breathe?

Es herrscht Uhu im Land: s/t (JAPO 60037)

March 22, 2013 | Tyran Grillo

Es herrscht Uhu im Land

Christoph Anders voice, guitar, organ
Heiner Goebbels synthesizer, piano, saxophone, voice
Alfred Harth saxophones, bass clarinet, voice
Paul Lovens drums, percussion
Rolf Riehm english horn, alto saxophone, voice
Annemarie Roelofs trombone, violin, voice
Recorded December 9-11, 1980 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Thomas Stöwsand

This early collaboration from saxophonist Alfred Harth and composer Heiner Goebbels is a telling lens of intersection through which to mine two fascinating careers. Harth will be familiar to ECM devotees as the progenitor of the label’s second album, Just Music, and would go on to release two further albums in other venues before meeting Goebbels in 1975. The two came together musically in a jazz-rock outfit called Rauhreif which, being to neither’s liking, dissolved, leaving these powerhouses itching for freer means of expression. It was in the context of this collaboration that Harth introduced the young Goebbels to the music of Hanns Eisler, which would of course lead to Eislermaterial, his most successful project to date. After connecting the dots for five years as a duo in various German settings, Harth called on the services of an old friend, Thomas Stöwsand, who’d played cello and flute on Just Music and was now headlong into the ECM storm. Stöwsand agreed to produce and welcomed into the studio Chris Anders, Rolf Riehm, and Annemarie Roelofs, each accomplished multi-instrumentalists, and drummer Paul Lovens. Such is the tangled web of Es herrscht Uhu in Land.

In it ideas were already taking shape that would become touchstones for Goebbels’s work, such as “Autobahn,” which meshes rallying songs with a field recording of its eponymous motorway, while “Wertkauf” betrays a less delicate side, sounding like something out of an Otomo Yoshihide free-for-all. The reversed vinyl and crunchy guitar make for a powerful contrast, each groove a cavity waiting for a tooth. “Mahlzeit” is a trembling gift, enacting a sacred touch of tongue to circuit. And one can’t help but uphold the frozen wasteland and creaking wonders of “Durch Den Wald” as a precursor to Stifters Dinge.

Riehm also makes a significant contribution with “Der Main.” Composed around poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, it thus lays another important keystone in the ECM ethos. This skip through space is like a sonic parlor trick, a knock on the door of memory, a wishful thought. Through a deft admixture of songs, the relay of word to voice moves in an extended meditation. At nearly eight minutes, it towers over the outlying tracks, which average around two minutes each, and underscores the otherwise restless musings therein with a bold cohesion.

The musicians turn air to solid with their touch. Intimate musings, talking brass, laughter, and wires share a bed, rolling in the sheets until something musical takes shape. Each body part becomes a note that in combination with other, activates instrumental ideas. Harth, for one, writhes in soprano-gilded spirals over the song of a hungry whale in “Echter Lachs” and pops the electronic bubble in “Knecht U.” Yet for the most part, the group works as a whole, spitting watermelon seeds out of cartoon mouths in “Ich Nicht Mich Dich” alongside the jackhammer of self-questioning. It pulls us into an underworld of radio signals, waltzing to the beat of a perverse drum (“El Salvador”) and changing channels with the twist of a rein (“Uhu”), all the while feeding voices through a sluice pipe of craft. A spate of translation (“Superbirdsong”), dust for wings and air, and we are in the forlorn wakeup call of “Tilt!” smoking monosyllables until they stain the lungs with honesty.

In this bedtime story for the escaped mind, the main characters are an adroit political insight, a leak in the colonial pen that ruins a fluid takeover with exposition of intent, and a crucible of retrospection. Neither derisive nor derivative, this project takes a good long look at the sandy areas of our consciousness and pours water on them for sandcastles. The water jug drains itself. The water jug waits for no one.

Back cover

Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet: Wisława (ECM 2304/05)

March 18, 2013April 12, 2013 | Tyran Grillo

Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet
Wisława

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
David Virelles piano
Thomas Morgan bass
Gerald Cleaver drums
Recorded June 2012 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Assistant: Charlie Kramsky
Produced by Manfred Eicher

They call it: space.
It’s easy to define with that one word,
much harder with many.

The verse comes from the poem “Before a Journey” by Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska, whose legacy gives color to a starry tribute from trumpeter Tomasz Stanko. Given the snapshot ethics of Szymborska’s visual language, one could find no better musical interpreter to put this epigraph to the test. For though words may indeed fall short of expressing these swaths of infinitude we call “albums,” the language of instruments in the right hands can accomplish the impossible.

Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012)

One need hardly expound the virtues of Stanko’s new allies, each handpicked from the profuse garden of the New York City jazz scene. Pianist David Virelles brings a robust gentility to the table that meshes effortlessly with Stanko’s own. Bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver—rhythm section to Craig Taborn’s trio—offer their dark synergy in kind. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and over the thickly whipped concoction of this 2-disc set it reaches our ears at the peak of flavor and consistency.

True to inspiration, Stanko and company derive wry upsweep from sentiments that, while unspoken, nevertheless dance in the spaces between. Of those spaces we encounter many, though of a markedly different cast from Stanko’s past ECM joints with the Polish quartet. Those expecting the aching, cool moroseness of that past may marvel at the prevalence of fire. The band swings with the best of them in “Tutaj – Here,” a track that takes its name, like a handful of others, from Szymborska’s final collection. Stanko leaps, as he does also in “Assassins,” at the fortuitousness of this meeting of word, feeling, and expression. He makes us aware of the here and now, as if we were there in the studio with him. Yet while the band is busy running all sorts of virtuosic errands in these dizzying soundscapes, we know that the finery is as thick as the souls it clothes.

The restless grooves of “Metafizyka” and “Mikrokosmos” find the band in a more down-tempo mood, though no less beguiling for melodic accuracy and Stanko’s unchained asides. Further allusions refract in “Faces” and “A Shaggy Vandal,” both highlights, taking their cue from Symborska’s poem “Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets.” Stanko is at the top of his lyrical game in the former, trading off artfully with the others in cells of interpretation, to which Cleaver adds a vivid soliloquy of his own, while the latter is a well-oiled machine that blends influences into a postmodern mélange of rhythmic beastliness.

Despite these dips into upbeat waters, creature comforts reveal a heart whose petals have only grown fuller with the blush of time. Still, lurking in the album’s tenderest moments is an emotional heaviness. This is apparent in the fine patchworks of surplus and deficit that are “Dernier Cri,” in which the ghost of Miles is felt tenfold, and the wistful, floating “Song For H.” For another, “Oni” summons with smooth ritual, showing restraint while inviting us all the same with its beguiling atmosphere: the hallmarks of any good Stanko tune. Though its charm may be as deceptive as its title (if indeed the Japanese meaning of “demon” is intended), we are better equipped for it to wander into “April Story,” which opens nostalgia like a love letter forgotten in the back of a sock drawer. It is a raindrop forever hanging at a leaf’s trembling tip, a tear that never falls but which is sucked back into the eye, whereupon it tells the others: Not today.

The title track and its 13-minute variation hug the set with dreams made real. Here the microscopy of the band is at full magnification. Stanko is the stain beneath Cleaver’s brushed cover slide, while Morgan and Virelles provide light and adjust the focus. Morgan’s especially contemplative soloing leaves us suspended before the blade of Stanko’s brass snips that thread and lets us drop into the quiet waters below. Notes linger, bringing us back to wistful ambiences of long ago.

Stanko wields his pen as surely as ever. His younger partners bring all the maturity needed to relay his torch with a grasp that lets everything slip through but the finest crystal. Tuneful to the core, each solo is a holistic admixture of heritages on the one hand and on the other elicits the satisfying crack of new eggs onto the frying pan. Do not go into this album expecting the lofty spaces of Lontano or Suspended Night. These songs are cruder oil to those past efforts’ refined, and all the more enchanting for it. Here the levels are grounded, not airborne. Denser and tenser is the name of the game. But let us not fall deeper into the trap of comparison, for Wisława possesses its own stage and protagonists. In this play there are no villains, only messengers of progress whose abilities precede them and whose reputations burgeon in golden light. Verily, verily so.

Promo video:

(To hear more samples of Wisława, click here.)

OM: A Retrospective (ECM 1642)

March 14, 2013January 27, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

OM
A Retrospective

Urs Leimgruber soprano and tenor saxophones, flutes, percussion
Christy Doran guitars, guitar synthesizer
Bobby Burri double-bass
Fredy Studer drums, gongs, percussion
Dom Um Romão percussion, berimbau
Erdman Birke accordion
Recorded 1975-80
Compiled by OM

The iconoclastic group known as OM (after John Coltrane’s album of the same name) took root in the musical wilds of Lucerne, Switzerland in 1972, and for the next decade filled its cup with an idiosyncratic blend of rock and free improvisation. Thus branded, its members launched into the electric jazz universe with comets blazing. Their brilliance had lain dormant in the Land of Out of Print for far too long until this program caught the ECM bug at last and made its way into the open. The current program, chosen by the band from its four JAPO releases, reflects an evolution that is both chronological and elliptical.

From Kirikuki (JAPO 60012) we get two representative tracks, with “Holly” firmly establishing OM’s spaces of conviction. The skittering drums of Freddy Studer, restless bass of Bobby Burri, punctuation of guitarist Christy Doran, and prophetic run-ons of reedist Urs Leimgruber bind a unique sonic book of ever-widening proportion. Leimgruber also plays flute, adding a flavor of incantation to “Lips.” Nourished by Doran’s metallic cries, he plants nostalgic flowers in trodden fields, whipping up a rustic and genuinely direct aesthetic.

From Rautionaha (JAPO 60016) comes the title track, of which the interaction between soprano and guitar is of special note. OM’s penchant for highly controlled insanity, its funneling of whistles and stomps, is elsewhere hardly more apparent. The power of making music together comes alive here. “Rautionaha” also boasts a memorable turning point when Doran unleashes a fluid dentist’s drill that sends the rest spiraling into a quiet, more introverted cause. From angular to curved, the contours turn in on themselves in an epic of sheer improvisatory credence.

Om with Dom Um Romao (JAPO 60022) also yields a single track: the enigmatic “Dumini.” Again, soprano and guitar lay out the welcome mat. Cymbals give them a trajectory to follow, a destination forever invisible because it calls from deep within. The flanged guitar cuts through the din like butter, melting the pain away.

Despite the forthrightness of the playing, many of the album’s moments remind us that even the most aggressive heat shelters a coolly beating heart, which is perhaps why Cerberus (JAPO 60032) makes it into the retrospective fully intact. “Dreaming for the People” begins its formula in much the same way as the previous two examples, only here Doran takes a decidedly fragmented approach, flinging packets of salt into the stew. Mystical turns abound thereafter in “Cerberus’ Dance” and “Asumusa,” each showing the breadth of OM’s sensitivity. “At my Ease” elicits watery textures from Doran as the rhythm section inspires some headstrong lyricism from Leimgruber on tenor. The guitarist’s moment in the sun, however, comes in the company of “Earworms,” a masterful hatching of dots and dashes in swirling pools of Morse code. Yet there is nothing so insightful as the final “Eigentlich wollte Johann auf dem Mond den andern Jazz kennenlernen.” This viscous fever dream, filled with galactic whale songs and lost answers, welcomes accordionist Erdman Birke into the fray for a haunting excursion into the soul. With the persistence of a flare drowning in an electronic swamp, it awakens hidden feelings. A radio blurs in and out of vision, intimations of faraway lands and rituals, painstakingly whitewashed until they bow in deference to the ether. In this music we can trace a satellite’s path.

To listen to OM is to witness an evolutionary process in biological time. This superbly assembled collection of music we can taste, smell, and touch, then, holds the key to its own reveal. It has a tinge of ash, a starchy texture, and licks like fire in a burning house, abandoned except for the music that has inhabited it for so long. Its magic has nothing to do with mystery, for it speaks with voices we already have in mind. Whether or not we recognize them is of no consequence. They know us inside and out.

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Eberhard Weber: Résumé (ECM 2051)

March 14, 2013 | Tyran Grillo

Eberhard Weber
Résumé

Eberhard Weber electric double bass, keyboards
Jan Garbarek tenor and soprano saxophones, selje flute
Michael DiPasqua drums, percussion
Recorded in concert 1990-2007
Recording engineers: Walter Speckmann and Gert Rickmann-Wunderlich
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There’s a reason why songs on a CD are called “tracks.” Each takes us on a journey somewhere, and no jazz bassist sports the conductor’s hat in quite Eberhard Weber’s way. Over the course of 1000+ concerts with the Jan Garbarek Group, the German bassist/composer has for decades enthralled listeners with unimaginable pathways, all the while defining and redefining a sound for the ages. Each of those concerts featured a solo entr’acte, wherein fomented some of his most extraordinary ideas. Résumé consolidates a cohesive selection of these in a fresh program of eternal ideas. More than mere interludes, each is a marker of the respective location that titles it.

Weber devotees will recall his 1988 Orchestra (link), half of which placed him in a solo spotlight. If that memorable record gave early and lasting insight into his uncompromising ear for melody, then Résumé furthers the crucible’s purpose in boiling down to the essence of who he is. This is Weber in the flesh, in no way obscured by the spontaneous loops, forged in real time, that issue from his electronic paraphernalia. Aside from these ghostly selves, his is not truly solitary endeavor throughout, for he also has a sprinkling of help from drummer Michael DiPasqua and saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the latter also on the selje flute. The overtones of this Norwegian folk instrument add blush to the canvases of “Karlsruhe” and “Bath.” The first paints arco flight paths like the steps of cranes lingering in the scent of freshly harvested rice paddies. The second is angular and playful, and finds Weber tying his bow into an assortment of harmonic knots before darkening into a heavy drone.

Such contrasts can be found as much within tracks as between them, though nowhere more acutely than in “Liezen.” The program’s opener is a window into the heart of a man whose artistry is heart incarnate. Lush chords usher us down a gallery of warm emotions, its walls decorated by the vibrant palettes of wife Maja that grace so many of his past album covers. Swinging from delicate pizzicato branches, Weber strings more robust vines through a germinating landscape. Keyboards scatter like windblown blossoms as Weber dances into the crowning night. The profundity of his intuition comes to fruition in “Heidenheim,” which weaves DiPasqua’s sparkle through looped matrices, each a world in a pocket fed to us in a trail of crumbs. Percussion and strings crosshatch again in “Amsterdam” and “Bochum.” Both of these, with their Steve Reichean marimba pulse, provide rich textural detail and irresistible propulsion. “Lazise” brings us out of the tunnel and into a wintry countryside, where a carnival of the mind awaits our arrival.

Garbarek’s reeds haunt the murkiest coves, fully a porpoise coaxed toward the setting sun while schools of fish swim spirals in the briny deep. With a presence like light through leafy shadow, he drops some of his most mystical sopranism on record into “Tübingen.” Here the feeling is of song, of evocativeness.

Weber’s fingers are feet, their paths still radiant all these years later. His traveler’s mind brings photographic clarity to every locale. Of Santiago we see the snowcapped mountains and spired churches, feel the swoon of star-crossed lovers whose bodies meet only under cover of dreams. In “Wolfsburg” we skim across water and technology, ending on a high signal cast into the world at large. Like its namesake, “Marburg” is a towering architectural node, leaving “Grenoble” nestled in its Alpine settlement, where cinematic strings blend us into terra firma.

(Photo by Jörg Becker)

This is more than a résumé in the sense of being a mere list of past accomplishments, for it engenders new ones through our experiencing of them. Like the crowd whose voices occasionally appear, we can only show our appreciation from far below, reading familiar shapes into every passing cloud.

(To hear samples of Résumé, click here.)

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