ECM Records

Charles Lloyd: Voice In The Night (ECM 1674)

| Tyran Grillo

Voice In The Night

Charles Lloyd
Voice In The Night

Charles Lloyd tenor saxophone
John Abercrombie guitar
Dave Holland double-bass
Billy Higgins drums
Recorded May 1998 at Avatar Studio, New York
Engineer: James Farber
Produced by Manfred Eicher

First loves never die. When it comes to jazz, Voice In The Night was mine. Not only was it the first proper jazz album I ever purchased, but it also introduced me to a tenor sound that had me at note one and has yet to let go. Memphis-born but California-spirited, Charles Lloyd has expanded the sweep of his instrument in incalculable ways by means of an unerring willingness to surmount every obstacle that stands in his way. After jumping the pond for a handful of (re)defining sessions, including the unmissable All My Relations and Canto, this fish out of water kept stateside, recording in New York’s Avatar Studios with a crew of new and old alike. By the time of this record, he and drummer Billy Higgins had had a history stretching back to the mid-1950s. Bassist Dave Holland and guitarist John Abercrombie were mixed recruits—Holland having shared a festival stage or two with Lloyd, Abercrombie fresh on the boat. Abercrombie had been especially astonished by Lloyd’s depth and phrasing, and the introduction of the former to the latter’s milieu was a masterstroke.

This album bears prime witness both to Lloyd’s songcraft and to the wonders it inspires in his band mates. His restless arpeggios are more than just that. Like emotional tics he can’t (and need never) shake, they constitute a grammar all their own, each a subtle unpacking. They flow throughout the title opener with such soul-to-soul intrepidity as to turn each gesture into a different shade of charcoal. With said charcoal this intensely laid-back quartet draws a bold landscape of shadows and dreams. Some ring more fancifully, such as a topflight rendition of the Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach tune “God Give Me Strength,” given here a full and chromatic treatment that pushes Higgins into the foreground with the inevitability of April wind. Lines of the eponymous tune reverberate in the playing:

And I don’t have anything to share
That I won’t throw away into the air

If Lloyd is the voice in the night, Abercrombie brings out the stars, calling forth a fluid artistry in what just might be his best date since Timeless. His soft, midrange-heavy tone flows like rain down a window. Standout moments abound in “Requiem” and in “Homage,” the second a hip display of acrobatic proportions. With fingers flying and solos enchanting (the homage can only be to Coltrane), in addition to a bubbling drum solo at the fulcrum, there’s much to savor in repeated listening.

Other dreams, such as “Dorotea’s Studio,” read more impressionistically. Abercrombie’s extended solo here inspires the rhythm section to build the melodic frame into which Lloyd eases his way and dances amid a collection of artifacts. Carved wood, painted canvas, developing film: these vestiges of impulse come to life in the absence of their creators. This is an emblematic track for its unforgettable vamp and organic shifts in key, all working toward a flick of an ending, abrupt and sincere.

Lloyd is so known for his personal reflections, and in this regard “Island Blues Suite” represents a return to roots. This multifaceted track blends backyard jam aesthetics and weaves through them, by way of Abercrombie’s strings, a chain of uninhibited dances. Subtle soloing from Holland and a keening guitar are icing on the cake. Lloyd takes the deepest dip into his canon with a newly re-imagined “Forest Flower” (this one goes back to the 1967 live album of the same name). The bossa nova undercurrent sets Abercrombie on a fruitful improvisatory path, while Holland’s whispers reveal the set’s dynamic charge. These interactions smooth into a long play-out before Billy Strayhorn’s melodic strength blossoms in “A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing,” in which Lloyd lays heavy tenderness over a Saharan pulse until earth and sky change places.

As a whole, the band maintains a steady river without the need for waterfalls. The fact that Voice is also a melodic tour de force for Lloyd in particular only sweetens the pot. His is a clarifying presence that brings lucidity to the current with so much vision, it’s almost blinding. James Farber’s rounded engineering gives us the clearest sense possible of the importance of space in the tenorist’s songcraft. The result is lyrical music-making at its best. Classic to the bone.

<< Erkki-Sven Tüür: Flux (ECM 1673 NS)
>> Keith Jarrett: The Melody At Night, With You (ECM 1675)

We Jazz interview

| Tyran Grillo

Please check out “Lauantaijatsit” (Saturday Jazz), a radio show hosted by DJ Matti Nives on FM station Bassoradio out of Helsinki, Finland. The latest edition, which you can stream here, features interviews with Manfred Eicher and yours truly, as well as a fine assortment of ECM gems, including a preview of the new Stanko record, Wisława. Matti’s occasional talking segments are in Finnish, but the interviews are all in English.

Matti Nives
(Photo by Hanna-Kaisa Hämäläinen)

Brahem/Surman/Holland: Thimar (ECM 1641)

| Tyran Grillo

Thimar

Thimar

Anouar Brahem oud
John Surman bass clarinet and soprano saxophone
Dave Holland double-bass
Recorded March 13-15, 1997 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The moment’s depth is greater than that of the future.
–Rabia of Basra (714-801)

Oudist Anouar Brahem brings his passion for past and future together in the present recording with reedist John Surman and bassist Dave Holland. Although he has singlehandedly revived the oud as a solo instrument, collaboration has always been at the heart of his craft, whether between himself and the spirit that moves him or with the muses of others. Most of the material on Thimar is Brahem’s and its lack of chording and bar lines in the scores presented Holland and Surman with new and fruitful challenges. One would hardly know it from the fluidity of the session. The album’s title means “fruits” in Arabic and, like those on a tree, the tunes it designates aren’t so much blended as connected by bark, water, and minerals. The press release cites recent musicological research which suggests that jazz may have its roots in the Middle East, for the West African musical traditions it mined were already syntheses of Islamic influences. This is not a “fusion” project. It is an illumination of roots.

Brahem also brings a love of Surman and Holland’s work, introduced to him by way of producer Manfred Eicher, notably through Road To Saint Ives and Angel Song. We might not be wrong, then, in shelving Thimar alongside those ECM gems. The latter of the two is especially ripe for comparison, as it likewise pushes jazz envelopes in an intimate, percussion-less setting. Only here, the added element of Brahem’s keen restraint breeds an enchantment of a different order. Despite his centrality in the program that unfolds, it is some time before he enters the stage. Instead, “Badhra” opens with an adaptive, harmonium-like drone from Holland and Surman’s buttery soprano wafting in the breeze. Holland melts into a solo that rises from the earth, soil made flesh. One might say he treats his bass like an oud, so that when Brahem appears at last it feels like a natural extension—youth to ancestor—and renders Surman’s intonation all the more calligraphic for its contours.

Surman is formidable in this setting, not by means of technical flourish but more so by the movement of his playing. He scribbles masterfully in “Mazad,” bringing an ever-deepening sense of destination to perhaps the most recognizable soprano in recorded sound. That singing reed has hardly sounded better. He further provides a lone interlude in “Waqt,” and one original, “Kernow” (Old English for “Cornwall”), in which his bass clarinet shadowdances with oud.

Holland’s contributions are equally profound. His walking lines in “Kashf” inspire a unified sermon from the trio and plunk like amplified raindrops from leaf to leaf in “Houdouth.” He is an accommodating and adaptable soul, especially in “Talwin,” where his drum-like sensibilities bring rhythmic drive (as they did in Angel Song) to the exchanges swirling around him.

For all the highs and lows, Brahem remains the ultimate truth of these proceedings, our guide on a journey he defines as he goes along. The heart-to-heart tunefulness of “Uns” pins the album’s ethos on its sleeve, evoking villages and bustling metropolises alike. In “Qurb” he adds metallic taste to Holland’s protracted Brew and sings into the tunnel. His “Al Hizam Al Dhahbi,” with its fluid doublings and harmonies, is the session’s crown, a memory in the making. There is a locomotive circuitry in his writing that runs all the way through “Hulmu Rabia” (Rabia’s Dream), signing off elegiacally with a nod to the first female mystic of Islam.

Thimar holds a coveted place in my listening life, for it was my first time hearing each of its three musicians. Separately, they are powerhouses of influence in their respective fields. Together, they are like the cover photograph: Holland the silhouetted land against Surman’s gradated sky, and Brahem the strings hatching their meeting at dusk.

<< Keith Jarrett: La Scala (ECM 1640)
>> OM: A Retrospective (ECM 1642)

Charles Lloyd/Jason Moran: Hagar’s Song (ECM 2311)

| Tyran Grillo

Hagar's Song

Hagar’s Song

Charles Lloyd alto and tenor saxophone, alto and bass flute
Jason Moran piano, tambourine
Produced by Charles Lloyd and Dorothy Darr
Recorded April 2012 at Santa Barbara Sound Design
Engineer: Dominic Camardella
Mastering: Bernie Grundman
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

Speaking of an ECM production in terms of engineering is like speaking of a Van Gogh painting in terms of brushstrokes: the two are so intimately connected as to make their parsing arbitrary. Still, it bears mentioning that with Hagar’s Song the label has taken a fresh direction due to the insistence of its artists on a naked sound. We hear it from breath one in Billy Strayhorn’s “Pretty Girl,” which under the fingers of the album’s protagonists—saxophonist Charles Lloyd and pianist Jason Moran—awakens to a new dawn. We hear it in the close miking of that unmistakable tenor, in Moran’s pillow of chords filling the recording space with the close-knit statements befitting of the duo dynamic. Let this be a cue, then, to witness the growth of these kindred hearts, whose cause is just getting warmed up. So begins a helping of Lloyd’s personal favorites, which include many familiar tunes re-spun by the patina of his lyrical edge. His bold evocation of every theme reveals an artist funneling his attentions into hard-won integrity.

Charles and Jason
(Photograph by Dorothy Darr)

Lloyd’s notecraft is a spectrum of infatuation and rests comfortably in Moran’s edgy blend of styles. To characterize the latter as a blend of the old and the new, however, gets us off on the wrong foot. His nostalgia is of a different order. The feeling of entrenchment intensifies the more he works with Lloyd, who gives him both a context and the freedom to run around it. Moran’s balance is one of seeking and restraint, of plangent cry and heartfelt whisper. Whether in the old-time swing of Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” or the haunting manifestations of the Gershwin classic “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” his roots remain strong and attract all sorts of wonders from the horn that inspires him. This would seem to inspire Lloyd in return. From the way he frames an octave before dropping into it all sorts of knots to be untangled to the skirting poetics of his angular original, “Pictogram,” his artistry gazes, bare and unblinking. For a concise summary of that very evolution, listen no further than “All About Ronnie.” Here: a prism with its own light.

We do a disservice in calling these renditions “soulful,” as if the tunes were not already so. Their timeless inherency is already set, leaving the patient duo to build whatever spontaneity is needed to bring their messages home. We hear this especially in “You’ve Changed,” which from the lips of Lady Day to George Michael has over the years settled in our bones, and for which Lloyd carries a unwavering torch of freedom through the forest of Moran’s discipleship. You’ll find no stone in this “Rosetta” (Earl Hines), because no translation is needed when caught up in the swing of things.

The session’s centerpiece, the five-part “Hagar Suite,” is dedicated to Lloyd’s great-great-grandmother. Taken from her parents and thrown into slavery at age 10, she was one of countless nameless faces in a river that has yet to dry. In Lloyd’s flute resides the quivering of her undying heart. It is the seed of protest, quiet, known only to those in whom it grows. The winds of change fan it like a flame, jumping from one ribcage to another until it sings. Like Moses in his basket, its melodies come from a land of fragments, of bodies broken and rejoined by the power of will. Moran matches Lloyd’s power of incantation with a ceremonial tambourine, which he plays in the hands or, in the painful lyricism of Part III, “Alone,” lays on the piano’s lower strings. It is the tinkling of a faraway dream, a cicada calling to the sands as if every granule were an eye. Through a veil of patience, the duo molds soil into something upright, that it might wander of its own volition from sea to shining sea in search of the wisdom of age…if not the age of wisdom.

If “Hagar Suite” is the album’s multi-chambered heart, then “I Shall Be Released” is its blood. The genius of this Bob Dylan tune has never run so thick as it does here. The same holds true for “God Only Knows.” This insightful look into the mind of Brian Wilson pays homage to Lloyd’s session work with the Beach Boys in a spatial epilogue that carries us far over the horizon to a place where children are forever safe and their parents shed tears only by way of joy, knowing they have everything they need in each other.

Because of the nature of this project, talking about the musicianship in terms of “solos” is moot. Lloyd and Moran are two pans of the same scale, the chain of which hangs from a tall, tall hand of justice. Hagar’s Song not only shows great technical intuition, but also a multifarious instinct for programming. In assembling this set, they have handpicked from the best and added to it, living in the shadows of the originals as much as in their light, and through it all with a love clear as sky.

This is jazz at its most embryonic, the fulfillment of wishes standing the test of time. Like Lloyd’s offshoots, it never strays from the core of what needs to be said. No room for poker faces; only the genuine rake it in.

(To hear samples of Hagar’s Song, click here.)

Tomasz Stanko Quintet: Dark Eyes (ECM 2115)

| Tyran Grillo

Dark Eyes

Tomasz Stanko Quintet
Dark Eyes

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Alexi Tuomarila piano
Jakob Bro guitar
Anders Christensen bass
Olavi Louhivuori drums
Recorded April 2009, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gerard de Haro
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Dark Eyes marks the studio debut of Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko’s quintet with two Finnish musicians—pianist Alexi Tuomarila and drummer Olavi Louhivuori—and two Danish—guitarist Jakob Bro (previously heard on ECM as a member of Paul Motian’s Garden of Eden band) and electric bassist Anders Christensen.

Whereas Lontano explored Stanko’s artistry to its most vertical depths, this project seeks the horizontal in the sweeping arc of a surveyor’s compass and finds itself enamored of a life “So Nice.” The selfsame opener is still concerned with space, but in a more immediate way than its predecessors. We still have that same bejeweled interior, which for all its value lives in the heart of shadow, but in it is a lesson: gentility is a privilege that must be earned.

Right off the bat, Bro’s electric adds fresh tonal color to the Stanko sound-world, and continues to bring soft focus and shine to “Terminal 7.” This quintessential travel song puts Stanko in the pilot’s chair, even as Bro emerges from the earth below as a hypnotic, thermal squall. Lesson: the past can only be dead if we are not alive.

“The Dark Eyes Of Martha Hirsch” takes its inspiration from a painting by Oskar Kokoschka. It hangs at New York’s Neue Galerie, where Stanko found himself transfixed by the image. The theme works like a stitch, which is to say it entails an over and an under, a visible and an invisible. Of the album’s ten tunes, this is the most soundtrack-ish, bleeding from one scene into the next at Christensen’s prompt while throwing in some hot and heavy for good measure. Bro lays on the magic again, at one moment coordinating with a snare hit so organically that the latter seems to ring with it—prelude to a hip round of solos, of which Tuomarila’s is particularly fit. Lesson: speed gets you nowhere faster if you tame it with expectation.

Dark Eyes Painting
Martha Hirsch (Dreaming Woman), 1909

“Grand Central” is among Stanko’s more memorable themes and brings together an appropriate combination of nostalgia and bustling poetics. Tuomarila takes the roll of bassist, providing the throb behind every gesture. Lesson: always remember where you’re going.

Another metropolitan tribute follows in “Amsterdam Avenue,” which after a thematic tradeoff morphs into a forlorn portrait of the city, where the artist’s brush has only rain and smoke to choose from on his palette. Lesson: even when you remember where you’re going, try a new route to getting there.

“Samba Nova,” a diary from the quintet’s trip to Brazil, begins in a cellular vein, where a life of street music and mountain songs rolls in a quiet avalanche. Buoyant playing from Bro and foot-paddling propulsion from Tuomarila give Stanko all the room he needs to blow freely and easily. Lesson: never forget where you’ve come from.

Stanko pays homage to Krzysztof Komeda, ever a touchstone in his musical career, in a nocturnal incarnation of the jazz pioneer and composer’s “Dirge For Europe.” Its bass line stands out for imbuing Stanko’s song with more than enough starlight. Tuomarila’s ebony-and-ivory arithmetic makes as many subtractions as additions. Lesson: listen to the land, and it will tell you mournful things.

Our interlude shines in the “May Sun.” A gentle breeze of piano, a dreamy bass, the murmuring of drums. Lesson: brevity is the key to life.

“Last Song” takes a page from the book of Balladyna in a deft revaluation. This time its ink is of a deeper hue, its edge twinned by looking back. Lesson: everything is new.

And with the gentle “Etiuda Baletowa No. 3,” also by Komeda, the set closes on a whisper, a sigh, a sliver of moon. Here we lie, wrapped in the folds of slumber…to sleep, perchance to dream. Lesson: the words have found us; only the music needs to catch up.

Whereas Stanko’s previous Polish outings floated beyond any curtain, here they stand firmly onstage (more literally in the cases “Terminal 7” and “May Sun,” both incidental music for playwright Lars Norén). We could compare them all, but wouldn’t that spoil all the fun of exploration? Try it, be moved, and realize that Stanko testifies to something unrecoverable yet which feels closer than in anyone else’s hands.

(To hear samples of Dark Eyes, click here.)

Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Suspended Night (ECM 1868)

| Tyran Grillo
Version 1.0.0

Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Suspended Night

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded July 2003 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Two years after the classic Soul of Things, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko and his young Polish sidekicks took things to the next level—by going deeper into the night. Stanko’s uniqueness comes through his ability to be at once atavistic and novel. He turns an ear to those spaces in between notes and shows us just how musical they truly are. This is to say nothing of the fact that his tone only seems to get more fluid as he ages, sometimes burrowing its way through a thickly described sentiment, at others swooning from the percolations of its discovery. He is sly and cool, and with the committed trio at his side there is nothing to fear on either end of the brass.

“Song for Sarah” spreads its roots into an earthy prologue for the ages. Like “Nicolette” (from a different classic, Angel Song), it sinks its teeth into a cloud, one that finds absorbent life here through the ten “Suspended Variations” that follow. In the first there is already an album’s worth of material to unpack. As he has done before, pianist Marcin Wasilewski brings the rain, only now its colors speak as much as they sing. Set aloft on Michal Miskiewicz’s popcorn snare and with Slawomir Kurkiewicz’s netted bass, Stanko’s subtle panoply of pops and whispers turns the ingredients of the solo into a home-cooked soliloquy.

The more you get to know this music, if not the other way around, the more its gradations clarify. What at first, for instance, feels like a tracing of that indefinable border between flying and falling in Variations III and IV reveals more domestic light with every listen. It is the kind of playing one can only dream about, wrapped as it is in a cloak of lens flare to stave off the half-hearted imitators of the world. The seemingly straightforward groove aesthetic of II and V pulls another curtain to the dawn, finding in every crosscurrent a decodable sigh. The responsive playing from the rhythm section here is something of a marvel. The pianism of VI wraps around us like skin and for the first time brings palpable darkness to the album’s palette. Stanko’s restraint is such that we can’t help nodding our heads and squinting our eyes into the billowing smoke that welcomes us.

Variation VII just might be the jewel of the set. Short and sweet, it reveals the breadth of the quartet’s subtleties in a sleek and compact package. VIII is likewise studded with microscopic touches from Wasilewski. Stanko, meanwhile, threads the needle with a hand so intuitive that his fingernails blur into the inlay of the valves until X fulfills the promise of suspension at last.

There is a veiled spirit to Suspended Night. Touched by the hesitations of a melancholy philosophy, it dispels the myth of origin and creates one for itself. This is the scar of maturity, the infant’s cradle chopped into firewood and burned until smoke and a few lullabies are all that’s left to prove its having been here.

Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Soul of Things (ECM 1788)

| Tyran Grillo
Version 1.0.0

Tomasz Stanko Quartet
Soul of Things

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
Marcin Wasilewski piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicz double-bass
Michal Miskiewicz drums
Recorded August 2001 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“I’ve been playing the same song my whole life,” says trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, who puts his claim to the test in thirteen numbered tracks under the title Soul of Things. Together they are not variations on a theme, but are a “balladesque suite” built around the theme of variation. And who better to weigh this theory than the all-Polish backing of Marcin Wasilewski (piano), Slawomir Kurkiewicz (bass), and Michal Miskiewicz (drums)? For perhaps no one else has internalized every aspect of Stanko’s career with such commitment and chased it down with a healthy ECM diet to boot. Being in the legendary space of Oslo’s Rainbow Studio, under Manfred Eicher’s careful and deepening guidance no less, stirred their blood to permeating, concerted action in a timeless document.

Even if I wanted to resist contextualizing Stanko’s music against a silver screen, one can almost feel the tick of raindrops on gabardine as Variation I bathes us in film noir atmosphere. Stanko’s protagonist is recognizable from the first curl of fog that precedes him. The band’s attunement, down to the molecular level, is also palpable in Kurkiewicz’s attention to space, finding in Wasilewski’s pianism fertile ground for unmitigated ideas beneath a sprinkling of drummed dew. Variation II glides along with an ice-skaterly flow. Stanko’s gentility here astonishes, though even the more upbeat variations like III and X maintain an elasticity of time that softens our ears. From lullabies of empathy (IV) to heart-wrenching spotlights on closed curtain (XII), we feel every hidden thing as if it were already inside us.

Wasilewski, in his first ECM appearance, is the session’s golden child, spreading out every wrinkle with iron fingers. He paints a forest one branch at a time in VI, drums quivering like the wind-touched foliage. Likewise in VII. Billowing like a curtain in a summer breeze, it manifests the flexibility of our well-being and weaves its thread count to translucent density. The contemplative solo from Miskiewicz here is something of a transition point, a hidden portal through which Stanko breathes his undying love for the unspoken lyric. Like the cover image—a still from Jean-Luc Godard’s 2001 masterpiece Éloge de l’amour—it opens a sky in the mind’s eye, a rift of flame and critical reasoning.

In Praise of Love

So often Stanko comes close to the edge, hanging only by a finger, but pulls himself up just in time, filling every chasm with hope before stepping confidently on his way to the next. We hear this in IX, when after an ascending line he waits for the implications to settle before auguring their full-blown fate. Such profundity abounds also in XI. It is filled sublime moments, as when Stanko unleashes a raspy cry and Miskiewicz responds not with a rise in intensity but a flowering of cymbals, gentle yet sure. From a long solo intro, the final variation plies the studio’s reverberant space as one might a deity with questions that are their own answers.

Soul of Things only grows more ponderous as it develops, trail-marking its passage not with breadcrumbs but with delicacies far more edible by heart. This quartet, while formidable, is never confrontational, even when Stanko is blatting his golden song across the stratosphere. His titles may always come after the fact, but the soul of these things has been there from the start.

<< Yves Robert: In Touch (ECM 1787)
>> Helmut Lachenmann: Schwankungen am Rand (ECM 1789 NS)

Tomasz Stanko: From The Green Hill (ECM 1680)

| Tyran Grillo

From The Green Hill

Tomasz Stanko
From The Green Hill

Tomasz Stanko trumpet
John Surman baritone saxophone, bass clarinet
Dino Saluzzi bandoneón
Michelle Makarski violin
Anders Jormin bass
Jon Christensen drums
Recorded August 1998 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

A burning ridge. Gills of flame in the dark. Smoke rises; ashes sink. This is the visual manifestation of all that resounds From The Green Hill, yet another leap of profundity from Tomasz Stanko after the Polish trumpeter’s four-album ECM panorama. To achieve this, he couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate band: John Surman (dipping into his characteristic low reeds), bandoneón maestro Dino Saluzzi, violinist Michelle Makarski, bassist Anders Jormin, and drummer Jon Christensen decode the cover photograph as a meta-statement of Stanko’s bite and his underlying deference to the spirits lurking within his instrument. Of those, the ghost of Krzysztof Komeda opens its mouth most widely and unleashes its lachrymose glow at 24 frames per second in two versions of “Litania.” Saluzzi plays each alone, keying from them a vital thematic thread of Stanko’s sound-world, a floating lily with no destination but its will to bloom. Saluzzi thus adopts a narrative voice, without which the story would lack a vital organ.

Surman contributes the album’s frame tale in the form of “Domino,” which opens the set and also makes a penultimate reappearance. In the former incarnation, it constitutes a viscous introduction in which the free considerations of the band’s rhythm section (to which the bandoneón is bonded) are the matchbook strip to Stanko’s strike. “Stone Ridge,” also by Surman, puts his bass clarinet in the spotlight. Flowering from a solo violin before Stanko’s muted strains pull up the others in his net, the ensuing groove gives plenty of hooks for its chain of soliloquys, of which Makarski’s is utterly remarkable.

The compositional skin that keeps this all embodied is writ large by Stanko, despite the fact that he seems relatively absent. What he lacks in airtime, however, he makes up for with a honed improvisatory laser that etches every nook of this shadowy house in which we find ourselves. It all reaches a nadir in “Love Theme from Farewell to Maria” and in the title track. The level of attunement to every change in both offers hope against the somber charge. Not to be ignored, Jormin stands out for his restless solo in “…y despues de todo” and for the inversions of “The Lark In The Dark.” Christensen’s drumming, too, with its microscopic and sparkling current, sets off a halting sort of poetry. (Note also his free talk with Saluzzi in “Buschka.” Brilliant.) We end in “Argentyna,” which confirms the presence of a magnifying glass in Stanko’s Swiss Army knife, though with no loss of intensity—if anything, more of it. Stripped to the core of their melodic undertaking, his powers of recollection gnaw at the arbitrariness of intellectual border zones. His are not cerebral toys, but direct methods of communication, their raw rubato the touchstone of an unrelenting lyricism…and all of this with hardly a trace of aggression.

The genesis of From The Green Hill can be traced back to ECM’s May 1997 Whitsun concerts at the Hotel Römerbad in Badenweiler, Germany. It was there that Stanko found himself performing at the behest of producer Manfred Eicher, who dropped his weight into new and exciting pools. Several performances and one all-night jam session later (oh, to have been there…), we arrive in this masterfully interwoven place, where ebb and flow have only one name: you.

<< Alexei Lubimov: Messe Noire (ECM 1679 NS)
>> Paul Giger: Ignis (ECM 1681 NS)

Keith Jarrett: La Scala (ECM 1640)

| Tyran Grillo

La Scala

Keith Jarrett
La Scala

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded February 13, 1995 at Teatro alla Scala, Milano
Remixed at Rainbow Studio by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

February 13, 1995 marks an historic event. It was the first time that Milan’s Teatro alla Scala allowed a jazz musician to headline. Yet Keith Jarrett is, of course, more than his moniker and brings a wealth of music that is no less operatic that what normally graces its stage. For in the same way that opera embodies a flowering intersection of text, acting, and sound, Jarrett unapologetically translates vibration, feeling, and commitment through the lens of the body until their collective prism opens like an eagle’s tail. So begins another of his improvised piano concerts, which in this case augurs a twitch in the skin of space-time until it bleeds.

The melodious unfolding of Part I is a self-fulfilling wish. I cannot help but read shades of childhood into its 45-minute sweep that materializes before our ears. I feel it in the parental awe of the more delicate moments; in the expulsion of air that, with the flick of a pedal, comes tumbling forth with sepia; in the self-referential diamonds sparkling within: shades of Köln, of Gurdjieff (though here he seems to be doing more “writing” than “reading”), of monuments yet to be discovered. Jarrett keeps his hands close together at first, as if to embrace the intimacy taking shape between them, caging a bird whose flight is still a dream. His fingers move in gradations in much the same way that sunlight changes its constitution according to the passage of clouds. As the density grows into a veritable corn maze, Jarrett wraps his mind around a solution and strains that path through the voice. He mixes his breath into those of everyone in attendance, rotating on an axis of love. The feeling of pasture is profound. Like sand between the toes, it is rare and welcome. Finger rolls paint window boxes with the lingering light of day, planting a summer’s worth of flowers in a single cluster. When they wilt, they are but one stem. Caught in the pondering flame that borrows them from sight and reworks their scent into something audible, their continuity is a magic unto itself, a sutra without words. Part I ends in stasis, flipping by gentle degrees the plane of its existence until a full and impenetrable sphere is left behind, which, while translucent, steels itself against the vagaries of interpretation, spinning until it can sing again.

Part II holds a microscope to an eddy of schisms. Brief touches from pedal and tight flowering runs culminate in a fast-forward ball bounce. The music accelerates, is compressed. Meticulously detailed explorations of the piano’s upper register unchain a host of fresh impressions. Particle by particle Jarrett builds a raincloud and flicks its contents in fingerfuls of inspiration. Ever so gradually, his left hand bespeaks a deeper gravity, tumbling over rocks and smoothing into the glassine surface of a faraway lake. There something of life lingers and the kiss of death feels as far away as the horizon. This melts into one of Jarrett’s deepest tunnels of light. He soars in a Gershwinian mode, coating the land with stardust before playing us out to stealthy footsteps, the wake of an unbridled tide.

Jarrett paints worlds of transitions, if not transitions of worlds. Each moment is the fragment of a larger meteorite, whose face can only be heard yet never seen, whose tears can be tasted but never shed. This makes his decision to conclude with a rendition of “Over the Rainbow” far beyond touching. And a rendition is what it truly is, for it must be worked through the body like breath itself until it expands. It is all the more heartwarming for the storm of bravos that drenches its fields before they’ve even had a chance to dry.

La Scala stands out in the Jarrett archive for becoming more absent as its intensity builds. He flushes out unspoken rhythms with stomping feet, painting not external vistas but intimate anatomical diagrams, so that when the chording becomes denser and the music more fully resolved, it feels like dissolution. The relationship between sound and effect, then, is not causal. Just because these styles inhabit the same music doesn’t mean they inhabit the same body. It’s more that Jarrett allows himself to be attuned to their shuffling, inscribing things in real time as if they were self-evident

The brilliance of these solo events manifests not only through the sheer volume of material that flows through him, seemingly translated from some ethereal source, but also through the potency of his melody-making, which at his touch produces a songbook that is timeless and can only be accessed from a place of wonder.

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