Jazz

Dominic Miller: Diana (ECM 2849)

| Tyran Grillo

Dominic Miller
Diana

Dominic Miller guitar
Santiago Arias bandoneón
Nicolas Fiszman bass
Ziv Ravitz drums
Recorded December 2024
Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: November 20, 2026

Dominic Miller’s guitar seems to remember as it sings. Diana, his fourth album for ECM, takes its name from his mother, who died in February 2026. Following the dedication of Vagabond to his father, it adds another chapter to a musical autobiography whose most revealing passages emerge through the touch of others. The melodies carry a quiet melancholy, each inviting a response that gives its contours further meaning. Those responses come from musicians who know Miller’s language intimately. Bassist Nicolas Fiszman and drummer Ziv Ravitz return from Vagabond, while Santiago Arias brings the bandoneón previously heard on Absinthe into renewed conversation with the guitarist. Fiszman’s supple foundation accommodates the music’s changing directions; Ravitz works through gesture and texture, loosening the hinges of each tune. Around Miller’s plucked strings, Arias draws sustained lines that seem to contain the breath of an unopened letter. Together, they give private commemoration a body others can inhabit.

Recorded at Studios La Buissonne in southern France in December 2024, Diana also reflects the guiding ear of producer Manfred Eicher. His influence reaches into the musicians’ willingness to venture beyond familiar gestures, with the quartet’s trust making such exploration possible: a phrase can change direction because someone is there to receive it. These carefully formed compositions reveal themselves through the particulars of an encounter, each response altering the proportions of the recording space. Eicher’s sequence, which Miller regards as essential to the album’s coherence, extends that responsiveness across the recording, allowing one piece to illuminate an otherwise invisible doorway in another. Miller’s family remembrance becomes something his companions can carry with him, its weight distributed through the small mercies of attention.

Sparkling waves of guitar open the doors of “Jazz Hotel,” where cymbals scatter light across the bass and bellows. The mood is oceanic and supremely inviting, drawing us into its intimate atmosphere without letting the hard work behind it disturb its ease. Years of effort become effortless in music that dances to the tune of its own heart. Miller’s distinctive sound allows for such delicacy of expression that a plucked string can seem to turn the horizon on its axis. He is a master at creating distinct scenes for the mind’s projection screen, a most private cinema for the seekers of this world. Only this piece and the sparse, slow-motion film of “Rita” surpass the five-minute mark. Their images stretch toward the threshold of disappearance, while the shorter vignettes give us just enough detail to craft our own story in passing. The bandoneón’s sustained breath complicates the guitar’s brief illuminations, giving each moment a duration the clock can only misunderstand.

The reflective spaces of “Alta Loma” seem to transport us to a time and place that might never have existed without memory to keep them alive in the heart. Its feeling is somehow Mediterranean, yet cold stone architecture rises from those same waters, windows opening onto the reverse side of sunlight. Miller gives this impossible geography enough substance to shelter us, while leaving its foundations open to the sea. That doubleness carries into the wistful strumming of “Millionaire,” which brings us into blinding sunlight and allows us to see ourselves reflected in the grander scheme of things, even when the world seems to be ignoring us. Wordless vocals accompany the locomotive drums, sustaining the feeling of pressing on one’s own path while others remain content to stand still. Its organic fadeout loosens the allure of wealth suggested by the title, breaking the spell so that we might love ourselves again.

Miller has a flair for simple yet powerfully evocative titles, and the desert of “Vegas Dreaming” opens beneath stars quietly competing with the city lights. Beyond the bright facades, darkness gathers without needing to announce itself, deep enough to absorb the city’s insistence on being seen. Just when we feel settled, the band picks up its gear and moves on. The crisp turns of “Al Dente” carry the brittle radiance of fall foliage, though its haunting bandoneón draws us toward the roots beneath that brightness. Such endings reveal how much of a composition can reside in the space it leaves unoccupied.

Through the effortless changes of “Only You,” sentiment becomes a form of motion, its tenderness reaching into the dreamlike “Pigalle.” From its moving images, figures step into the audience and occupy the seat beside us. The bass-inflected groove of “Timeless” gives these realm crossings a physical footing, reminding us how readily the body enters territory the mind has yet to name. Miller covers a wide expanse of emotional and textural ground without allowing any scene to harden into a destination. In “Iguazu,” a subtly high spirit gathers those movements into a sun-kissed blanket of comfort.

Miller has never sounded so sparkling and beautiful. The production gives every exchange a tactile immediacy, revealing how much warmth a melody can bear without losing its shape. That warmth acquires a different gravity when we remember that these performances preceded the loss commemorated by their title. A dedication can reach backward, changing the meaning of something already given. The music carries its earlier life within the name of someone who can no longer hear it, and our attention begins to travel in both directions. All that’s left is to ensure there is still a future for retrospection.

Glen Moore and David Rothenberg: Bass Lines / Border Lines

| Tyran Grillo

David Rothenberg lists whales among his contributions to Bass Lines / Border Lines, an arresting credit for a record made in the Dance Hall in Arivaca, Arizona, near the U.S.–Mexico border. The opening piece, “Jaguar through the Wall,” puts that border in the path of an animal with its own reasons for crossing. By the 17-minute finale, “Lives of the Desert Whales,” a humpback has joined Rothenberg and bassist Glen Moore. Rothenberg was 18 when he spent a summer studying with Oregon, the group Moore cofounded with Ralph Towner, to whose memory the album is dedicated. He had been listening to Moore for decades by the time of this recording, and in an interview he mentions how closely a humpback’s song can resemble a bowed double bass. With Moore in the room, the resemblance is just as intriguing the other way around, and you start to wonder how much ocean a bass can hold.

The jaguar is already in motion when we arrive, and the immediacy of the playing gives us no time to craft arbitrary expectations for the improvisatory wonders about to ensue. Upright bass and bass clarinet are griots of subterranean (if not submarine) proportions, versed in whatever passes between a root and the rock it spends its life prying open. Moore’s slides and Rothenberg’s reptilian dances make for a gorgeous pairing, their lines doubling back across ground that each has opened for the other. Beneath the bubbling surface is a deep sense of structure, audible in how much time the players give a delicate passage to find its footing. Their mastery has everything to do with the way they listen, and you can hear it when one catches the tail of the other’s phrase and lets it go.

The arco strains and harmonically infused glissandi of “Coati Mundi” bring us into more crystalline territories, into caves hewn by the slow drip of mineral. The navigation is both external and internal, concerned with the contact of feet to earth even as it works through crevices in search of a softer place. The restraint here is striking, each slip of pitch exposing another translucent layer in what had seemed an indivisible darkness. The title track opens with a superbly articulated bass solo, and the release is so consummate that even Moore seems to have been overtaken by it. Rothenberg’s monologue rides the wave of a backgrounded reverb, charting a passage through time as a physical substance to be felt with the soles of the feet. When an echo lays another floor beneath a word that has just touched down, you can almost feel the ankle adjust.

As the duo comes together, grittier doctrines take shape only to be sliced by the blade of “Your Final America,” which brings cross-sections of the heart into focus. I hear a whisper pitched directly into the ear of an ungracious automaton whose instincts are wired for profit and exploitation. There’s an unnerving intimacy to the address, as though an apparatus of extraction might be persuaded to grow a conscience if someone spoke into it gently enough. Whatever tenderness our storytellers can recover from the encounter, they carry forward in the form of pollen, which has always depended on being taken somewhere it had no means of reaching on its own. Even the whimsically titled “A Lizard War” is a delicate conflict, one that creates as much as it destroys. Its scrapings and postures are part of a mutual language in which each contributor is an equal force, and what survives the scuffle is the possibility of succumbing just as quickly to the next encounter.

In “Lives of the Desert Whales,” the humpback’s song emerges as an organic sonic child and, in the same breath, a parent shepherding the space-time continuum through its own coming of age. The growling compass the musicians have been carrying through the desert now swings toward a creature for whom any line on a map must seem a remarkably provincial invention. The lines Moore and Rothenberg have been drawing all along are measured in breath and in the length of a bow stroke or finger strum. I imagine a fossil hunter lifting a human cochlea from an Arizona outcrop and cataloguing it as the shell of an extinct marine animal. There would be a certain justice in the error, for the most intimate thing that fossil could reveal about our species would be the shape of what once lived inside us without ever becoming ours.

Caroline Davis/Grey Mcmurray/Qasim Naqvi: Trappings of Sleep

| Tyran Grillo

On Trappings of Sleep, the latest release from former ECM producer Sun Chung’s Red Hook imprint, every musical phrase bears record of an intercepted confidence. Caroline Davis’s alto saxophone and electronics extend the body into that disruption, while Grey Mcmurray’s guitar illuminates the intervening dark. Qasim Naqvi approaches the drums with an alertness that makes even the smallest quiver consequential. Together, they suggest an observatory of reflection. Recorded in Brooklyn in May 2025, the album gathers compositions by each participant, giving their instinctive rapport a written framework that remains open to the discoveries of performance. Across this Red Hook Records release, the ear adjusts to unfamiliar magnitudes, discovering that a barely sustained tone can occupy an enormous expanse. The invitation is to listen beyond the point at which recognition usually permits us to stop.

The fascination of “Three” begins in its agitated details, which draw us toward something whose dimensions remain uncertain. Davis brings a palpable warmth to the emerging forms, allowing the alto’s physical character to persist amid the electronic shimmer. Her playing keeps a human presence within reach, however strange the surrounding coordinates become. A related restlessness inhabits “Joust,” where the guitar’s fractured gestures and the drums’ shifting footing make the encounter more volatile. Davis cuts her own path through their activity, her lines retaining an elusive quality even at their most incisive. That roughness makes the album’s beauty feel provisional, keeping the dark alive with possible disruptions. These musicians can expose an unstable surface while making us want to approach it, trusting curiosity to carry us across.

Another scale of movement becomes perceptible in the title track, where recurring guitar figures make the passing seconds unusually tangible. As the ear grows familiar with their contours, Davis discloses variations of feeling within the repetitions, and Naqvi’s restraint allows their weight to register. When writing the liner notes for this album, I described its human current in these terms: “Connection appears as a vibration that cannot be possessed.” Here, that thought acquires the delicacy of light arriving at a lens, its journey briefly gathered into an image. “Pulse” approaches the question of duration through Mcmurray’s guitar delays, giving an earlier gesture another life within the ensemble’s unfolding present. Davis and Naqvi attend to those continuations with care, accommodating sounds whose beginnings already belong to the past. An almost vertiginous depth opens between the initial articulation and its persistence, as the musicians respond to what is still arriving. Repetition acquires a peculiar poignancy here, allowing an echo to carry something of the tenderness we reserve for a departing voice.

Such temporal distances find a spatial counterpart in the relationships surrounding Davis’s melodic presence. “Out of the Way of It” brings her into close alignment with Mcmurray, their unisons giving the ear a slender means of orientation as Naqvi keeps motion supple beneath them. The longer perspective of “Mono Lake” leaves the saxophone more exposed, its inflections coming into focus within the sparer accompaniment. Following a phrase becomes an encounter with the effort of sustaining it, the instrument’s warmth made more affecting by the quiet around its edges. Mcmurray and Naqvi offer support with enough restraint to preserve the solitude of Davis’s line, and that balance rewards sustained attention. We hear how a musician can remain alone within a thought while being accompanied through its consequences. The observatory has discovered something familiar at an impossible remove, and the familiar has acquired the strangeness of being seen through fresh eyes.

The aperture narrows further in “The Toy,” until a melody seems capable of containing all the distance through which we have been listening. The tune has an openness that Davis inhabits without reserve, and Mcmurray’s replies shade its directness with an ache that remains difficult to name. Naqvi attends to that vulnerability through the delicacy of his interventions, keeping the surrounding activity close to the song’s emotional center. Something private has come within range, and the musicians preserve its fragility throughout the encounter. The recording’s wider expanses make this nearness especially affecting, since we have grown accustomed to searching for signs at the edge of perception. Even a modest melodic gesture now reaches us with the force of personal address, bringing the remote directly into the hands.

That address becomes more elusive in “Say It,” where Davis lets the edges of an utterance blur and the ensemble sustains the feeling left hanging around it. An incomplete statement can reveal how much of communication depends on another person’s attention, and the music gives that dependence an audible form. “Media Training” extends the inquiry into the uneasy business of presenting oneself for an audience, its title bringing a public gaze into this otherwise intimate encounter. The performance draws vitality from the friction between expression and the shapes through which expression becomes recognizable. We hear the players negotiating that friction without settling into a fixed representation of themselves, preserving the subtle departures through which a living voice escapes its portrait.

The album’s title leaves us hovering over the uncertain border between surrender and vigilance, where the mind’s loosened grip can sharpen the ear. Its vision moves by changes of focus, finding immensity within the interval between one musician’s decision and another’s response. For all the reach of its electronic extensions, the recording stays close to the bodies making it possible, preserving the sense that someone has risked a little of themselves in sending a sound outward. Listening supplies the other end of that exposure, and the task feels more absorbing as our own surroundings recede into realms we had mistaken for emptiness.

ALLVEI Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for All About Jazz explores the self-titled debut of ALLVEI, the trio of Norwegian guitarist Eivind J. Vullum, Polish saxophonist Jerzy Mączyński, and Swiss drummer Nicolas Stocker. ECM listeners will recognize Stocker from the intricate rhythmic weave of Nik Bärtsch’s Mobile on Continuum (2016) and his sensitive percussion alongside Areni Agbabian’s voice and piano on Bloom (2019). Here, his melodic approach to rhythm helps turn spectral electronics, searching saxophone lines, and sustained guitar textures into a journey through places both geographical and imagined. From the subliminal groove of “Driva” to the gathering intensity of “Kristiania,” the musicians allow each contribution to reshape their shared space. The album’s patient unfolding, attention to texture, and balance of compositional clarity with improvisational freedom give ECM fans ample reason to spin this one sooner rather than later.

Tania Giannouli/Nik Bärtsch Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My review of Metakosmos, the new duo album by Tania Giannouli and Nik Bärtsch, is now available at All About Jazz. Across eight pieces, the Greek and Swiss pianists bring melodic luminosity and rhythmic precision into an intimate exchange, exploring how attentive listening allows two distinct musical imaginations to create a shared world. Repetition becomes a means of discovering difference, while dampened strings, submerged strummings, and percussive accents reveal unexpected voices within the pianos. The review follows these encounters through dreamlike interiors, spiraling patterns, and moments of poised exuberance, considering how the music makes room for meanings neither player could arrive at alone

Alan Pasqua: My New Old Friend

| Tyran Grillo

Time has a peculiar way of inhabiting music, gathering in the hollows between notes and returning through melodies whose origins have long since dissolved into memory. For pianist Alan Pasqua, whose career has traversed the incandescent frontiers of jazz fusion and the intimate architectures of acoustic improvisation, such temporal hauntings find exquisite expression in My New Old Friend. Having studied with Jaki Byard and joined Tony Williams’ New Lifetime following a fateful Carnegie Hall encounter in 1975, Pasqua later lent his harmonic imagination to Bob Dylan and Santana. His celebrated “Proto-Cosmos” remains an emblem of that earlier volcanic vocabulary. Yet beneath the electricity, another language had been quietly ripening, one whose silences carry the sediment of entire lifetimes. Released by Cryptogramophone in 2005, My New Old Friend gathers six originals and five lovingly reconsidered standards into a meditation on remembrance’s peculiar elasticity.

The title acquires particular poignancy through the intertwined histories of its musicians. Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine first crossed paths at Indiana University, sharing a Bloomington farmhouse in 1971 before their careers carried them across the expanding cartographies of jazz. Bassist Darek Oles, a more recent collaborator, completes this convergence of histories. Recorded at Conway Studios in Hollywood during sessions spanning 2003 and 2004, the album was conceived with almost devotional attention to detail. Pasqua even brought his handcrafted Yamaha S6 into the studio to ensure a particular sound. Oles supplies a supple gravitational center while Erskine’s exquisitely calibrated touch allows rhythm to breathe beyond its own circumference. Companionship becomes a form of listening whose deepest syntax is the freedom to discover something previously unimagined in someone already known.

“You Must Believe in Spring” opens with a lushly articulated piano introduction, an act of emotional architecture whose foundations materialize beneath our feet as we enter. Pasqua’s touch is sensitive yet texturally bold, every harmonic choice carrying a quiet inevitability. Erskine skips with the grace of a waterskater while Oles swings through the gaps in the trees on a vine of utterly melodic fortitude. “All the Things You Are” brings a more spirited gait, Erskine’s cymbals scintillating at the edges of Pasqua’s effortless invention. The trio plays as though it had written the tune, its changes passing through their hands as naturally as breath. “Body and Soul,” meanwhile, locates nostalgia at the microscopic level. You cannot see it with the naked eye, yet you feel it unmistakably in the clothed heart. Pasqua’s solo dips a tentative toe into a river down which the trio’s vessel has been gliding all along. Such hesitation, held within an otherwise unbroken trust, becomes its own measure of beauty. Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman” spreads its soft, creamy abundance into every nook and cranny of the imagination until it ceases to be visible. Even “Smile,” the balladic offramp, offers something considerably grander than a fond farewell, its tenderness ambulating with an unsettling lucidity.

Pasqua’s originals sit comfortably alongside these tried-and-true companions. From the opening gestures of “Barcelona,” we are in masterful hands, guided through fluid changes of light and scenery. Its urban touch is wonderfully unobtrusive, and Oles’s bubbling solo wells up from someplace deeper than the street beneath it. “Vienna” opens with another masterful introduction, verdant with the tenderness of an embrace postponed for years. As it slides into a mid-tempo anthem, the city of the title seems to surrender its physical coordinates and become an address within.

“Highway 14” extends into motion, with Lina Brunkell’s wordless vocals lending the open road a reflective sheen that doubles the sky along with the possibilities of arrival. Pasqua floats with the ease of a leaf surrendered to its own trajectory. Underneath, Oles shoulders much of the melodic weight while Erskine quietly clears the path, each rhythmic gesture offering reassurance without dictating a destination. The road becomes an unwritten sentence belonging equally to departure and anticipation. Through Brunkell’s voice, language itself momentarily forgets its vocation to explain and evokes the peculiar eloquence of having nothing to prove.

The title track is a timeless ballad seemingly created in the moment of its telling. Pasqua’s organic soloing traces the fine line between what has been remembered and what is being invented, until the two become inseparable. “One More Once” occupies a more askew rhythmic terrain, every slide and sudden turn handled with such mastery that even its darker shades feel necessary. Pasqua’s gorgeous runs find every necessary current in the rhythm section. “Stick Slap,” meanwhile, is a romping good time that speaks in smiles, displaying the trio’s coherence at its most exuberant. Even here, virtuosity never becomes a contest for the foreground.

I am admittedly late to the party in placing this recording on my virtual turntable, but perhaps lateness is precisely the point. Those who come to Between Sound and Space for more than ECM should by all means seek this one out. Few recordings make generosity sound quite so rigorously intelligent. What stays with me most is the quiet ethical possibility concealed in the album’s title. To call someone an old friend is to acknowledge a history; to call that same person new is to admit that history can never exhaust a human being. Knowledge of another person can become a beautiful form of captivity. Pasqua and his companions open the door of that captivity from within, allowing recognition to remain open to surprise. Perhaps this is the most difficult kind of fidelity: granting those we love the right to exceed the person we have made of them. The music poses a question whose consequences reach into every human encounter. What if we listened to strangers with the patience we reserve for old friends, and to old friends with the astonishment owed to strangers?

Enrico Rava Fearless Five with Joe Lovano: Corners (ECM 2868)

| Tyran Grillo

Enrico Rava
Fearless Five
with Joe Lovano
Corners

Enrico Rava trumpet, flugelhorn
Joe Lovano tenor saxophone, tarogato
Matteo Paggi trombone
Francesco Diodati guitar
Francesco Ponticelli double bass
Evita Polidoro drums, vocals
Recorded July 2025
Auditorium Parco della Musica
Ennio Morricone, Rome
Recording engineers: Angelo Mincuzzi, Massimiliano Cervini,
and Roberto Catucci (supervision)
Mixing engineer: Stefano Amerio
October 2025, Udine
Cover photo: Max Franosch
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: October 16, 2026

On Corners, Enrico Rava’s lyricism acquires fresh contours in the collective imagination of his Fearless Five. Melody enters a studio whose occupants can move the walls, and the trumpeter’s familiar eloquence discovers unfamiliar dimensions within its own breath. Formed after an impromptu concert outside Rome in 2022, the quintet takes its name from a composition on his 1978 Enrico Rava Quartet. Guitarist Francesco Diodati, trombonist Matteo Paggi, bassist Francesco Ponticelli, and drummer Evita Polidoro bring distinct compositional identities to the ensemble’s ECM debut, joined by guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose partnership with Rava yielded Roma in 2019. Diodati alone had worked with Rava in other groups; their intuitive rapport helps make freedom a practical condition of the music. Recorded at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica on July 21–23, 2025, and produced by Manfred Eicher, the album gathers contributions from every participant. Shared authorship becomes an invitation to alter the terms of belonging. Rava’s language passes between generations, acquiring shadows with anatomies of their own.

His flugelhorn introduces “Certi angoli segreti” with a supple assurance that lets the melody reveal itself by degrees. There is something clandestine in its poise, a private staircase descending through the center of a public gesture. Diodati’s delicate marbling deepens the rhythm section’s contours, giving Lovano ample space to carve airborne trajectories without losing the grain of his sound. The tenor’s robust delicacy holds ascent and gravity in the same phrase. Around Rava’s unraveling lines, the ensemble adjusts its proportions, allowing a melodic turn to become an opening through which the whole group can pass. Paggi’s solo burns through that space with exhilarating conviction, its lower register lending physical force to the gathering intensity. Diodati, too, pursues distortion, summoning a brilliance reminiscent of Terje Rypdal: the guitar’s radiance has teeth. Across nearly 12 minutes, the piece establishes how freely this ensemble can change direction while keeping each player’s presence sharply audible. Even the most fugitive line leaves a pressure mark.

That expansiveness makes the intimacy of Diodati’s “Sin peso” especially arresting. Its cinematic sensibility allows the open distances of a western to fold into noir’s troubled interiors. Rava’s muted trumpet moves with the composure of a figure carrying an undisclosed past; each phrase seems to know which door would be dangerous to open. The guitar supplies a landscape whose horizon has been confiscated, leaving the melody to negotiate distance through touch. Polidoro’s “Le mie gambe” draws that inward movement closer to the body. Sung by its composer, it is one of the album’s most affecting performances, her voice finding a passage through the instruments that seems scarcely wide enough for speech. Slinking guitar and tender bass give the song a palpable warmth, while the horns bring its emotional implications forward through their intimate harmonies. Feeling becomes audible at the point where the individual timbres begin to soften into one another. The voice inhabits that threshold, lending the ensemble’s abstraction a pulse beneath the skin.

Lovano’s “Sun Rava” unsettles the ground again. Its abstract blues opens onto freer exchanges, with momentum repeatedly finding and relinquishing its footing. The tenor’s conversation with drums and bass is particularly enthralling: Polidoro and Ponticelli make motion responsive enough to accommodate Lovano’s changing inflections, so that each rhythmic decision has consequences for the next breath. Freedom here involves the vertigo of being heard with such precision that an impulse can alter the entire group’s direction. Rava’s “Hitchcock at the Beach” concentrates its drama into a much shorter span, Polidoro’s vocals adding a silver sheen to its nostalgic atmosphere. Lovano’s melancholy points toward tragedy with remarkable restraint, leaving grief suspended at the threshold of articulation. The ache resides in that withheld disclosure. On “Tone, Shape and Colours,” a collective improvisation sparked by a Lovano motif, the tarogato gives contemplation a reedier edge. Bells and gongs float across the surface as tensions gather beneath them. Their eventual surrender to rest feels almost anatomical, a clenched hand discovering the space inside its palm.

Ponticelli’s brief “Ça va sans dire” distills these roaming impulses into a melodic aphorism. Its nocturnal wanderings leave Diodati a generous surface on which to work, the guitar giving depth to a statement whose brevity invites close attention. Rava’s “Bowery Dance” then turns toward the remembered streets of his New York years. Guitar fuzz and pliant bass introduce an abstract opening before a harder groove assembles itself, interrupted by stops and starts that keep its momentum alert. Lovano and Rava exchange phrases with lived experience in their jaws, allowing memory to find fresh musculature in the present tense. Their ease carries the knowledge of musicians who can recognize an opening before it has fully formed. Paggi’s “Mamma” brings this restless company into a tender close. Its gentleness gives the ensemble’s responsiveness an unexpectedly vulnerable meaning, reaching beyond the bandstand toward the strange beginnings of personhood. A child enters a language already in progress, addressed long before it can answer. Someone lends significance to a cry; a sound acquires a place in another person’s life. The musicians’ mutual attention gives that ancient transaction an adult complexity, their experience deepening the risk of allowing a phrase to need an answer. Fearlessness becomes unexpectedly fragile here, entrusted to another pair of hands. Rava’s lyricism, so articulate throughout Corners, approaches the obscure tenderness from which articulation first emerges. The first person begins in the second.

Christy Doran Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

Christy Doran’s history with ECM traces a restless path through the guitar’s expressive possibilities, from OM’s combustible blend of rock and free improvisation on sister label JAPO to the intimate experiments of his later collaborations. Throughout, his playing reveals an ear equally attuned to abrasion and delicacy, finding unexpected colors where acoustic resonance meets electronic transformation. A quintessential example is Red Twist & Tuned Arrow, recorded with fellow guitarist Stephan Wittwer and drummer Fredy Studer: a music of intricate exchanges and sudden openings, whose adventurousness carries an unmistakable sense of joy. That spirit continues in his latest record, Disambiguation, a collaboration with tabla player Imran Khan. I have just published my review on All About Jazz, and I invite you to read it and discover where Doran’s ever-curious imagination has taken him next. Click the cover below.

Enzo Favata: Ritornare (ECM 2883)

| Tyran Grillo

Enzo Favata
Ritornare

Enzo Favata soprano saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet
Daniele di Bonaventura bandoneón
Marcello Peghin ten-string guitar
Salvatore Maltana double bass
U.T. Gandhi drums
Recorded January 2026
Bavaria Musikstudios, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 18, 2026

Every return contains a betrayal. The place may remain where it was, yet the person approaching has been revised by distance, while memory has moved the streets. On Ritornare, Enzo Favata treats return as imaginative recovery that transforms whatever it retrieves. Music carries landscape within experience, with literature serving as a compass across waters whose histories mingle beneath imposed names. The title points backward, though the album keeps opening forward. Home survives as an activity of attention and belonging that has quietly learned a foreign language in one’s absence.

Favata has long listened for submerged connections. Born in Alghero, Sardinia, in 1956, the saxophonist and clarinetist developed a musical language shaped by his native island, then widened it through the greater Mediterranean and distant shores. Atlantico, formed in 1999, gathered impressions during South American travels while attending to African inheritances across the ocean. “Tukuman” makes this migratory history palpable. Brushed drums and double bass establish a softly revolving ground, soon deepened by Daniel di Bonaventura’s bandoneón. Marcello Peghin’s guitar rises through it, and Favata’s soprano traces the theme in lucid arcs. The tune begins in transit, already pondering somewhere beyond its horizon.

Such movement never requires Atlantico to surrender its center. Favata and Peghin share decades of collaboration rooted in southern Italy, while bassist Salvatore Maltana and drummer U.T. Gandhi join di Bonaventura in a collective whose music expands without compromising its infrastructure. On the above-mentioned “Tukuman,” Favata dances through sudden turns as di Bonaventura weaves through a zoetrope of half-recovered scenes. A locomotive pulse gathers below the surface; elsewhere, the ensemble skims forward on the tensile calm of open water. Their travel is purposeful without submitting to destination, driven by the joy of motion itself.

The album’s journeys are as much literary as they are musical. Favata has recognized portions of his imaginative territory in Isabel Allende and Jorge Luis Borges, whose visible worlds admit secret laws. Gabriel García Márquez occupies another canopy in this forest of affinities. Favata describes Atlantico’s music as suspended between dream and reality, and “El Sur” dwells within that tension. Its melody seems to have waited inside the listener for years, requiring these musicians to pronounce it. Favata’s soprano carries a warm tone through each key change, altering its shape as the harmony breaks into tessellated color. No player merely accompanies another. The music passes among them as collective evidence from a dream whose witnesses recall different aspects of the same event.

That equality of attention gives the album much of its emotional authority. “Escuchame” brings Favata’s clarinet forward with grave tenderness, carrying a winding theme that seems to hold dust in its mouth and an old key beneath its tongue. Gandhi places minute percussive touches around it, while Maltana’s bass turns through the harmony with unforced intelligence. Di Bonaventura and Peghin shelter the theme without enclosing it. The performance reveals an ethical awareness in which each voice makes space for another to become more fully itself. Such intimacy rises from years spent hearing the fraction of a second before a friend decides where to place a note.

The quintet’s history therefore enters the recording as an invisible player. In “Donde nace el viento,” Peghin’s delicate strumming draws reverie into three dimensions, each chord swaying above an imagined Mediterranean courtyard. Favata’s soprano gives the moving air a throat, while marine salt flavors every unspoken word with distant relatives and childhoods spent along the shore. Recorded at Bavaria Studios in Munich in January 2026 with Manfred Eicher producing, Ritornare is Favata’s first album for ECM and Atlantico’s most finely illuminated acoustic statement. Eicher allows silence to acquire mass while every tone retains its contour. Sardinia remains audible beneath the compositions, and other continents move within their rhythmic memory as currents rather than destinations.

This spacious acoustic world carries echoes of classic ECM sessions without collapsing into homage. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti can be sensed in its meeting of lyricism and space. John Surman occupies a nearby constellation, his shadow passing across the low reeds. “Sine nomine” opens a cinematic chamber where Dino Saluzzi’s tenderness meets the patient visual imagination associated with Theo Angelopoulos. Yet influence behaves as nourishment rather than costume. Associations surface and blur into Atlantico’s own language, one assembled from human contact and therefore resistant to distillation. The composition’s title, therefore, feels apt. It moves through identities without accepting permanent residence in any of them, leaving an outline that the mind continues to fill with speculation.

“Milonga del Sol” extends that cinematic feeling through a haunted dance, holding sweetness near an ache it never attempts to cure. Eleni Karaindrou’s bittersweet gravity hovers at the edge, then Favata veers into improvisational flight and loosens the reference’s claim. His phrases persuade gravity to reconsider its loyalties while the band maintains an exquisite balance between ritual and surprise. Di Bonaventura compresses whole lifetimes of longing into the bellows, and Peghin answers with translucent chords. Gandhi and Maltana keep the dance moving from centuries beneath their feet.

Such ambiguity gives Ritornare its peculiar attraction. The music recognizes places the listener has never visited, awakening the impression of a past that belongs to no single lineage. “Ventana” sharpens that paradox through an unprecedented view of a landscape already seen through other eyes. Its window also examines the act of looking, the secret appetite through which attention changes its object. Favata frames the view, then disrupts it, before the ensemble follows him into a terrain where recognition morphs into estrangement. Familiar materials are angled until their concealed surfaces catch the light. The piece asks how long a life can contain beauty before the mind finally notices, leaving a window open inside the question and the observer exposed to an answering gaze.

“Albatros” gathers the album’s virtues into a final statement of astonishing restraint. The tender throatiness of bass clarinet gives the piece an earthbound gait that brightens from within. When the soprano opens above it, the instrument spreads a wing across the morning and calls toward the sea, a prayer for the hidden catch to rise. The ensemble avoids spectacle, allowing desire to lose its dominion in favor of something selfless. Impeccably performed and recorded, Ritornare contains some of the most enduring melodies to emerge from a Manfred Eicher production in recent years, making it a persuasive contender for ECM album of the year. Its deeper triumph resists ranking. Perhaps the self is only the harbor’s temporary arrangement of ropes and salt-worn voices, held together long enough for one vessel to recognize another. Far beneath that exchange, the drowned map turns over in its sleep, and every border drawn upon it opens a patient ear.