Jazz

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.

V/A: Peace Anthems

| Tyran Grillo

At a moment when peace can feel less a condition than a distant country, Peace Anthems asks where the journey toward it might begin. Conceived by producer Sun Chung to mark the fifth anniversary of Red Hook Records, the album gathers artists from across the label’s community around that urgent question. Their answers offer no settled definition and make no claim to resolution. Instead, they open a field of possibilities in which peace becomes connection and reconciliation, transformation and repair. It emerges as the difficult practice of listening to what cannot readily be resolved, then remaining present once certainty has withdrawn.

Across these pieces, notes and silences become measures of shared time. Musical elders travel beside restless sonic architects before the forces of history carry them toward their own fruitful destinations. Qasim Naqvi’s modular synthesizer enters into conversation with the trumpet of Wadada Leo Smith, while Taylor Deupree’s sound design enfolds Kalia Vandever’s trombone and Thomas Morgan’s bass. BlankFor.ms creates electronic architectures for Moor Mother’s voice; Sungjae Son draws tenor saxophone and bass clarinet into the earthly respiration of a pump organ. Elsewhere, Martha Deribe and Simone Maggio cultivate intimacy through voice and Fender Rhodes, Amina Claudine Myers joins Smith at the volatile border between composition and improvisation, and Andrew Cyrille gives rhythm the force of embodied memory. Kit Downes, alone at the pipe organ, searches its vast interior for signals that may never reach their intended recipients. Each artist stretches time toward a place where another relation to one another, and to the land beneath us, might become imaginable. This music does not retreat into an untouched sanctuary. It works for armistice while wars rage, binding breath to breath and carrying hope beyond abstraction.

Naqvi’s “Al Badawi” establishes the album’s moral hue through lush, droning synthesizer pads whose gradual movement makes stillness feel hard won. Tranquility appears here as a human baseline that daily friction and global violence repeatedly disturb. The scale may change, but the rupture remains recognizable: an interruption at the edge of thought, a misunderstanding allowed to harden, a conflict granted enough authority to consume entire lives. Naqvi gathers the scattered self without pretending it can remain whole indefinitely. Calm is held close through the night, only to be discovered missing at dawn. Yet the piece refuses despair. Within its suspended harmonies, the world’s talons are shaved down to harmless nubs, and danger briefly loses the grammar through which it makes itself understood. That reprieve carries ethical weight. Rest becomes preparation rather than escape, a way of restoring the attention required to recognize another person’s suffering.

The stillness of “Al Badawi” passes almost imperceptibly into the more unsettled suspension of “Wither Light and Airy,” where Deupree, Vandever, and Morgan occupy the interval between oppression and liberation. No one can tell whether the music is about to rise or surrender to gravity. Vandever’s trombone mourns the loss of its own innocence against the glittering ash of circumstance and time, its phrases opening into spaces that Deupree handles with meticulous care. Morgan’s bass moves through fields of memory, finding pathways among what has survived and what can no longer be recovered. Their restraint protects the piece from easy consolation. Freedom remains close enough to sense yet too fragile to claim, and the uncertainty gives every gesture consequence. A tone may become a hand extended across distance; the surrounding silence may expose how far that hand still has to travel.

Language enters this unstable territory through “Imaginary Lines,” the collaboration between Moor Mother and BlankFor.ms. Moor Mother’s spoken meditations fracture across electronic textures, while words are torn and restored in the image of political movements whose promises of restitution arrive incomplete. The piece recalls the emotional surgery of early Laurie Anderson but also the sisterhood of Gloria Anzaldúa, sidestepping the evasions of gentle vocabulary by allowing darkness to speak in its own register. Questions of responsibility coil through watery electronic wormholes, pursuing resolutions that remain beyond reach. Underneath them lies a meditation on birth and on those who make birth possible, whether by care or sacrifice. The title exposes the lethal authority granted to invented boundaries. A line conceived in the mind can be enforced upon a body; an abstraction can divide a riverbank or turn a neighbor into an enemy. BlankFor.ms makes those borders audible as distortions in the signal, while Moor Mother searches the damaged transmission for a vocabulary capable of reaching the living.

That search continues in the two collaborations between Smith and Myers, whose respect for inhalation gives every exhalation the gravity of testimony. “Sonic Requiem” hangs in space among the bodies it seeks to acknowledge before diplomacy sweeps them beneath its mound-laden rug. Smith’s trumpet arrives gravelly and worn, bearing the abrasion of a voice required to repeat what power has chosen not to hear. Myers responds with a pianistic touch of extraordinary delicacy, offering sincerity without sentimentality. Their pauses carry names that official parlance has reduced to figures. “Reflections on Palestine” brings a deeper fire to the surface, clarifying its melodic intentions early while preserving the risk of improvisation. Smith and Myers approach grief as a living organism rather than a classified document. The music refuses to turn suffering into scenery. It asks who receives the privilege of being mourned as an individual, then searches for forms spacious enough to restore singularity to the dead.

Sungjae Son’s “The River of Imjin” shifts the album’s center toward a landscape marked by division. Reeds and pump organ generate an inward-facing hymnody drawn from the soil, as though the earth has absorbed every border imposed upon it and begun quietly revising the map. Son touches the harmonic satisfaction of a physiognomy in motion before the music settles upon a countenance recognizably our own, filled with wonder at our capacity for love and shock at the selfishness that so often accompanies it. The river bears memory across jurisdictions that insist memory must stop at the checkpoint. Its current exposes the arrogance of borders by continuing through them, preserving an older knowledge of connection without erasing the pain accumulated along its banks.

Human tenderness acquires a more intimate scale in “War Is Over,” where Deribe’s voice meets Maggio’s Fender Rhodes with remarkable restraint. Anger remains present, but the performers refuse to let it become the only mouthpiece available to the wounded. Their quietness anticipates the labor awaiting everyone once the wreckage reveals itself through clearing smoke. Deribe sings from within the protective space of a lullaby, and maternal care becomes a form of resistance against forces that regard vulnerability as expendable. Maggio supplies warmth without disguising the damage. The title, therefore, reads less as a declaration than as a responsibility. Ending combat cannot repair a nervous system trained to fear the next explosion, return the missing to their families, rebuild a home, or persuade a child that sleep is safe. Peace must enter the smallest rooms and relearn the weight of an unguarded body.

“Three Years Later,” performed by Naqvi, Smith, and Cyrille, confronts the endurance contained within that responsibility. Cyrille’s Afro-Caribbean-inflected pattern on cowbell and toms expands the album’s geographic consciousness, making rhythm a vessel for histories that official borders cannot contain. Naqvi’s electronics inhabit the fundament, while Smith’s trumpet addresses the firmament with a cry shaped by survival. The title recognizes time’s failure to guarantee healing. Three years may mark recovery or merely measure how long an injury has gone unanswered. Cyrille’s pulse keeps both possibilities in motion. Memory does not stand still here but travels through the body and teaches the hands a different way to count.

Kit Downes inscribes the collection’s musical arc with two solo pipe organ works that push the instrument beyond its inherited associations with ceremony and permanence. “Into the Woods – 3 Weary Calls” suggests animals dying beyond human sight, their fluted swan songs thinning through the darkness. The organ becomes habitat as much as instrument, its pipes opening hollows where exhausted voices seek shelter. In “Closing Meditation for OM,” a train whistle enters the imagination as a breath of life while higher callings burn through their brief trajectories, leaving the sky emptied of reassurance. Downes finds frailty inside the organ’s immensity. Air moves through engineered chambers, yet the result feels mortal, uncertain of its destination and aware that every call depends upon someone choosing to answer.

With all proceeds benefiting the International Red Cross, Peace Anthems converts contemplation into material aid. Its modest scale enlarges its purpose, joining aesthetic attention to the practical work of sustaining lives. The album understands that peace cannot remain an attractive principle preserved beyond the reach of consequence. It requires maintenance, protection, and a willingness to recognize whose security has been purchased at the expense of another person’s fear. These musicians provide no anthem that a crowd could sing without complication. They offer something more demanding: a rehearsal for attention, conducted in tones porous enough to admit grief and disciplined enough to keep grief from becoming destiny.

Perhaps peace begins where imagination accepts responsibility for what it has imagined. Every border started as a thought. So did every refuge. These artists, each a force of good in their own right, leave us with that unnerving symmetry, placing creation and destruction frighteningly close together. The same human faculty that invents a reason to exclude can conceive a door, then build it wide enough for the stranger carrying the name we have not yet learned. An anthem earns its name by making room for voices history tried to render posthumous. Here, that space becomes an empty altar, upon which listening lays the first stone.

(For more on Sun Chung and the Red Hook label, see my recent interview with him for All About Jazz here.)

Andy Sheppard: Salt Catchers (ECM 2856)

| Tyran Grillo

Andy Sheppard
Salt Catchers

Andy Sheppard tenor and soprano saxophones
Rita Marcotulli piano
Michel Benita double bass
Recorded March 2025, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Jan Kricke
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 11, 2026

Across six ECM releases, Andy Sheppard has treated ensemble form as an instrument in and of itself, altering the ambient details around his reeds so each setting reveals a different nuance of his breath. The quintet on Movements in Colour surrounded him with shifting densities, Trio Libero pursued more intense conversation, and his quartet with Eivind Aarset opened electronic passageways through acoustic terrain. Most enduringly, the trio with Carla Bley and Steve Swallow placed his lyricism inside a world where wit could hold hands with pathos.

Salt Catchers begins another chapter, bringing the English saxophonist together with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita for the first time as a unit. Their cohesion suggests that certain ensembles exist before they are convened, awaiting only the studio in which their latent testimony can be documented. The drummerless format retains a trace of Sheppard’s years with Bley, whose “Lawns” is the sole nonoriginal among nine pieces, yet memory is a hidden foundation rather than a governing premise.

Most of the album was written during the pandemic, as Sheppard moved from the guitar-centered environments of earlier projects toward chamber music’s concentrated intimacy. Marcotulli opens fissures within composed material, while Benita touches the folkloric roots of Sheppard’s writing without disturbing the earth around them.

A Portuguese shadow passes through Salt Catchers. Now living near Lisbon, Sheppard draws on the gravity of saudade, allowing longing to organize melodies that function as complete emotional bodies rather than maps for improvisation. Their romanticism carries something of John Martyn, absorbed so thoroughly that its source has become molecular. Recorded in Lugano in March 2025 under Manfred Eicher’s direction, the album gathers geography and recollection into a deceptively calm surface, demanding that every note justify the silence it displaces.

“Elevation” establishes this economy with piano that raises a transparent structure around the listener. Sheppard’s tenor enters above its own shadow, offering a melody whose openness contains the ache of distance, while Benita traces the invisible contours that keep it suspended. An echo of Charles Lloyd inhabits Sheppard’s spacious tone, though time may be the deeper influence: decades of listening move through his sound as sediment, leaving the line clear as the past gathers beneath it.

Where “Elevation” offers a horizon, “Lawns” provides an address. Bley’s composition flowers into a suburban psalm, its chords carrying the holiness of ordinary refuge. Marcotulli’s phrases hold survival and repose within the same circumference, as Sheppard’s breath-softened lower register gives the melody human grain and Benita places each note with tender exactitude. With each iteration, the harmony resembles a childhood house whose rooms change dimensions whenever one tries to enter.

The title track begins beneath the keyboard’s conventional surface. Reaching into dampened piano strings, Marcotulli releases metallic murmurs and half-born harmonics. Sheppard’s soprano evokes salt as residue and preservative, the crystal in which an evaporated sea continues thinking. When the musicians reach the concluding unison, three private trajectories have discovered a single edge.

The Portuguese current nears the surface in “Encantos,” whose buoyancy gives Sheppard’s melody an unforced radiance. Enchantment survives through partial concealment: the tune gives itself freely while keeping a central chamber locked. Later, “Salgado” answers with understated montuno inflections and geometric harmonizations.

“Draw You In Stars” opens with a luminous piano arpeggio, a spiral staircase whose destination recedes as it rises. Sheppard’s tenor exposes a vulnerable grain before he and piano meet, then part for Benita’s restrained, quick-minded solo. Marcotulli moves farther from the harmonic center, seeking a truth faithful to instability.

Marcotulli opens “This Too – Three Hills” like a book at an unknown page, and Sheppard enters carrying the next sentence in his breath. The hills become folds in memory, elevations made by all the mind has buried unevenly. As the playing dissolves into breath and pause, each phrase embraces uncertainty instead of converting it into drama.

Absence takes intimate form in “Those That Left.” Piano and bass communicate across a missing center, exchanging signals whose tenderness derives from what they decline to resolve. Marcotulli’s dream logic brings light to grief’s edges without making loss decorative. “Irene” then gathers bass and soprano into a supple dance before piano widens the emotional field. Elegant without sweetness, it draws darkness inside radiance, knowing beauty does not cancel sorrow but grants it another form of circulation.

Marcotulli is the session’s revelation, turning modest gestures into portals through which whole emotional cartographies appear. She does not decorate the music; she alters its physics. Benita gives every contour a quiet gravitational center, allowing Sheppard’s melodies to travel without losing human proportion.

The title contains the key. Salt preserves by entering what it preserves, becoming inseparable from the body it protects. These musicians practice a related attention: each voice receives the others deeply enough to be changed, yet no identity dissolves. Listening becomes a willingness to let another person’s silence speak for itself. Perhaps civilization begins there, in the discipline required to let another person’s unfinished phrase live.

La Buissonne Studios (RJAL 397003)

| Tyran Grillo

Released in 2005 as a promotion-only compilation, La Buissonne Studios occupies the elusive third chamber in the catalogue attached to the celebrated recording complex at Pernes-les-Fontaines. Its history was built through improbable labor. Gérard de Haro and two childhood friends first recorded musicians in a modest space at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue; an encounter with bassist Barre Phillips sharpened their desire for a professional studio. They found a hangar and house in Pernes, worked with acoustician Marc Beaufils, and opened La Buissonne on September 1, 1987.

Since then, its rooms have helped define modern European jazz as a silent collaborator, familiar to ECM devotees yet present across numerous labels. Only one ECM recording appears here. That scarcity clarifies the compilation’s purpose: less a house sampler than a map of circulation, showing how one acoustic language can pass through radically different bodies without imposing a uniform complexion. Many selections arrive as excerpts, fragments of fresco carrying enough pigment to imply the civilization around them.

The Jean-Philippe Viret Trio opens one inward passage with “Par Tous Les Temps,” as heard on Étant donnés (Sketch SKE 333025). Édouard Ferlet sets an arpeggio in motion as Viret’s double bass moves beneath him and Antoine Banville’s cymbals scatter radiance across the pulse. A processional shimmer brushes Steve Reich’s language without surrendering jazz’s appetite for contingency.

The Sketch label reappears through Michel Graillier and Riccardo Del Fra’s “Blue Wind,” via Soft Talk (SKE 333014), where piano and bass achieve rare conversational transparency. The inward gravity deepens in Stéphan Oliva’s “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago,” from Fantasm (RCA Victor 74321739252). Bruno Chevillon bows his bass until sorrow acquires grain, bowing to minute percussion marks from Paul Motian at the edge of Oliva’s piano.

That private concentration eventually seeks a public body. Under Bernard Struber’s direction, the Orchestre Régional de Jazz d’Alsace turns “Le Phare,” the title piece of its Enja album (ENJ 93592), into a festival whose gaiety contains structural rigor. Guest Louis Sclavis adds another hinge; brass and reeds exult while the rhythmic center remains lucid.

Claude Barthélemy finds harsher collectivity in “Mama Barth Blues,” recorded with the Orchestre National de Jazz for La fête de l’eau (Le Chant du monde 2741228). His guitar strikes the ONJ’s polished mass and releases gorgeous unrest. Andy Emler’s MegaOctet pushes the principle beyond decorum. The previously unreleased “Bal Tribal,” featuring Marc Ducret’s acoustic guitar, wanders through a hospitable delirium where direction keeps changing its name. On “4/4 Cm3/Horizons,” included on Dreams in Tune (Nocturne NTCD 361), Médéric Collignon’s voice becomes percussion and alarm signal before breaking into ecstatic fracture, as Emler’s ensemble treats meter as tensile sculpture.

Another family of pieces gathers around the exposed voice and its difficult bargain with intimacy. “Down by Love,” from Youn Sun Nah’s So I Am… (In Circum Girum ICG 0204-1), holds self-possession and vulnerability within the same trembling filament. David Neerman’s vibraphone opens suspended space, while Benjamin Moussay, Yoni Zelnik, and David Georgelet alter its depth and footing. Nah sings from the point where command begins to quiver, and that quiver becomes sovereign territory.

John Greaves approaches the art of song from a more autumnal interior on “The Price We Pay,” preserved on The Trouble with Happiness (Le Chant du monde 274 11 99). Sophia Domancich’s piano and Vincent Courtois’s cello enlarge the chamber in which mortality has taken a seat. Lucilla Galeazzi brings fiercer blood to “La Luz de Oro,” heard on Trio Rouge (Intuition INT 33532). Her diction tears a bright incision through the darkness, Courtois answers with pizzicato cello, and Michel Godard’s serpent coils through the lower register.

The geographic imagination then widens. Daniel Mille’s “Entre chiens et loups,” the title track of his Emarcy release (013535-2), lets the accordion carry an entire horizon inside its bellows. Jules Bikoko’s double bass provides the patient floor; Jean-Christophe Maillard moves between piano and guitar, with Minino Garay’s percussion tracing paths through the dust.

Carlos Maza’s “Guanabacoa,” appearing on Fidelidad (Emarcy 016109-2), opens the frame across a broad percussive field. Maza’s piano, voice, and cries of acclamation make awareness sudden and bodily before the excerpt withdraws. Jean-Marie Machado’s “Tua-Badalada,” taken from Leve leve muito leve (Hortus/Didier Maes H 100), gathers singers and wind players into modal pageantry. A trace of Carl Orff passes through the writing, though Machado’s fairytale has stranger laws, its tower built downward into recollection.

Scale contracts as smaller ensembles excavate dream matter. François Raulin’s “Légère Houle,” on Trois plans sur la comète (HatOLOGY 582), places his piano beside Bruno Chevillon’s bass and lets François Corneloup’s baritone saxophone roam through the clearing they create. Voice doubling introduces a child’s candor, turning wonder into a form of exact knowledge.

Claude Tchamitchian’s “Rêve. Hommage à Sayat Nova,” drawn from Le monde est une fenêtre (Émouvance EMV 1018), brings his double bass into dialogue with Gaguik Mouradian’s kamancheh across a narrow abyss. Earth and ether exchange substances; wood dreams in mineral. Louis Sclavis and Vincent Courtois achieve related concentration in “Grand Comme le Monde,” a clarinet-and-cello theme drawn from Denis Gheerbrant’s film Grands comme le monde rather than a conventionally catalogued album. Its brevity gives it the density of an inscription.

Rhythm itself becomes philosophy in Daniel Humair’s unreleased “Drum Solo,” drawn from the Work sessions for Sketch. Humair sends thought through skins and metal, asking how consciousness might proceed if it had no nouns, only impact and decay. Sparkle carries shadow, even as momentum becomes a life force whose destination recedes.

Eric Watson’s “Tryst,” documented on Full Metal Quartet (Owl Records 159 572-2), answers with the perilous discipline of the ballad. Mark Dresser’s bass and Ed Thigpen’s drums create a foundation supple enough to disappear. Watson’s piano offers tenderness without sentimentality, leaving Bennie Wallace’s tenor free to roughen the lyric surface. His sound bears the abrasion of a truth dragged across distance, and the quartet’s restraint makes every fracture audible.

Two larger visions convert audibility into conscience. Jon Balke’s North Magnetic Orchestra supplies the compilation’s lone ECM emissary with “Falling,” included on Diverted Travels (ECM 1886). Strings gather around Per Jørgensen’s wordless voice, creating a lullaby whose destination has been erased from the map. The piece suspends arrival, asking listening to survive without possession.

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra carries that suspension into historical responsibility on Bill Frisell’s “Throughout,” heard on Not in Our Name (Verve B0004949-02). Although the album was recorded in Rome, Gérard de Haro mixed it and La Buissonne later hosted its mastering, proof that the studio’s authorship sometimes begins after the musicians leave the recording floor. Carla Bley shapes the opening with Haden, Chris Cheek and the horns unfold in varying densities of duration, and Steve Cardenas threads guitar through the restrained ache. The performance never confuses beauty with innocence. Its tenderness has political weight because every lucid tone carries the pressure of what lucidity obliges us to see.

François Couturier, Jean-Marc Larché, and Jean-Louis Matinier gather those obligations into “Epilogue Requiem,” part of Music for a While (Émouvance EMV 1017). After Couturier’s piano opens in dark concentration, Matinier’s accordion and Larché’s soprano saxophone gradually lift the music into another register, though hope arrives with scars still legible in its grammar. The title promises an ending, while the performance quietly disputes the jurisdiction of such a concept.

Across this rare disc, La Buissonne’s crystal clarity makes room for separateness, preserving the pressure around a cymbal stroke, the darkness under a bowed note, and the breath before a singer risks becoming audible. The microphone receives vibration, but also ancestry and unborn meanings gathering around a phrase. What the studio preserves is that instant when something personal becomes an aperture. Through it, one can almost glimpse a future archaeology in which our civilization is known neither by its monuments nor by the catastrophes it mistook for destiny, but by the care with which a room once held a vanishing note and refused to let its fragility count as disappearance.

Ralph Alessi: A Sun That Never Sets (ECM 2864)

| Tyran Grillo

Ralph Alessi
A Sun That Never Sets

Ralph Alessi trumpet
Joseph Alessi trombone
Matt Mitchell piano
John Hébert double bass
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone
Recorded February 2025
Oktaven Audio Studio, Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mixed by Manfred Eicher, Ralph Alessi, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Ralph Alessi and Manfred Eicher
Release date: July 3, 2026

On A Sun That Never Sets, Ralph Alessi expands the architecture of his quartet by adding a second horn: his brother Joseph, a trombonist best known for his work with the New York Philharmonic. Their shared history gives the music an immediate intimacy, but the album draws its energy from the differences between their voices. Joseph is more than a featured guest. His burnished tone changes the ensemble’s center of gravity and reveals new colors in Ralph’s compositions. The result is an album concerned with kinship, not only between brothers but also between freedom and form.

Pianist Matt Mitchell and bassist John Hébert return alongside Ches Smith, who moves between drums and vibraphone. The musicians navigate Alessi’s writing with confidence, allowing angular ideas to open into clearings where lyricism can emerge without becoming sentimental. The influences of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky remain present without sounding imitative. Coleman’s example encourages melodic liberty, while Stravinsky’s is evident in the music’s rhythmic disruptions and structural precision. These forces help the album sound cerebral but never clinical. Each musician receives ample space, yet every contribution remains connected to the group’s larger movement.

The title track establishes this language through a precise theme that gradually loosens into exploratory improvisation. Smith’s vibraphone and Hébert’s bass approach the music from different angles, creating productive uncertainty over where its rhythmic and harmonic direction originates. Mitchell supports Alessi’s trumpet without restricting it, enabling the bandleader to move beyond the tune’s apparent boundaries while retaining a thread back to its central idea. The performance captures the strength of a quintet that can surrender a fixed destination without losing its sense of direction. Unity comes through the negotiation of contrasting approaches rather than strict agreement.

Several pieces turn that tension inward. “Nothing Is Dead” suspends piano and vibraphone within an elusive harmonic atmosphere, allowing its meaning to emerge gradually. Alessi’s trumpet is assured but guarded, conveying emotional weight without forcing a single interpretation. In “Ether,” Smith’s brushed drumming opens space beneath Mitchell’s wide range of touch, attracting fragments of memory into the present.

The closing “Behind Clouds” extends this fascination with concealed presence. Over Hébert’s steady, intoning bass, the ensemble proceeds with melodic care. Placed beside “Nothing Is Dead,” it creates correspondence across the record, as both compositions examine how absence can remain active.

The brothers’ most prominent duets, “Relaxed Misery” and “Of Trees (Variations on a Theme by TB),” bring the album’s interest in inherited language into sharper focus. Trumpet and trombone circle one another through muted exchanges, sometimes converging and sometimes letting the space between them carry the conversation. “Relaxed Misery” earns the sardonic tension of its title, turning discomfort into buoyancy and giving Ralph room for some of his most animated soloing. “Of Trees” is more oblique, developing its theme through disparities that keep the source partly hidden. The pieces share a jaunty, alert quality, but their emotional charge comes from the brothers’ ability to recognize and challenge one another in real time.

A familial current also runs through “Twichild,” “Slow Dancing Bear” and “Duck Face,” whose titles suggest private humor and childhood memory. Each uses wonder as a disciplined way of reconsidering familiar materials. “Twichild” follows delicate, winding lines toward a more inward mood, with Ralph’s precision made unusually vulnerable. “Slow Dancing Bear” finds tenderness in an awkward rhythmic gait, allowing weight and grace to coexist. On “Duck Face,” Hébert provides a perceptive countervoice before Smith’s solo releases the tune from its established footing. Together, the tracks treat play as a vital form of communication.

“Sweet Spot” occupies a warmer region. Its spacious, glowing color recalls Enrico Rava, while Mitchell’s piano creates a suspended foundation beneath the horns. Joseph’s trombone contributes a dusky depth that approaches a lullaby without becoming overly sweet. Small harmonic disturbances keep the tune’s balance alive. “Transitional Imagery,” by contrast, converts instability into propulsion. Mitchell and the rhythm section move with fierce clarity, shapeshifting as they proceed. The title could describe Alessi’s broader method: his music is most alive when one shape gives way to another.

Across these 11 originals, Alessi’s fluency as a player and composer gains a more varied context. The expanded ensemble shows how strongly his music depends on the willingness to offer an unfinished thought and let another musician transform it. His writing gives each player a distinct orbit while maintaining a field of mutual consequence. Freedom, therefore, carries responsibility, since every spontaneous gesture changes what is available to the others.

Steve Swallow: Winter Songs (ECM 2879)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Swallow
Winter Songs

Mike Rodriguez trumpet
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone
Steve Cardenas guitar
Gil Goldstein piano
Steve Swallow bass
Adam Nussbaum drums
Recorded September 2024 at Sear Sound, New York
Engineer: Tyler McDiarmid
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
An ECM Production
Release date: June 26, 2026

“I was there when this music was written. In fact, my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. Before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe.”
–Steve Swallow

Winter Songs is one of those albums that arrives quietly, carrying the circumstances that shaped it. Steve Swallow’s first true leader date since 2013’s Into The Woodwork, and his first appearance on the label since contributing to John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, does not present itself as a comeback. Instead, it sounds like music assembled among close friends, with each idea given time to settle into its clearest form. Its restraint, therefore, evokes the confidence of an artist with nothing left to prove.

Swallow is joined by saxophonist Chris Cheek, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, drummer Adam Nussbaum, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and pianist Gil Goldstein. These longtime collaborators approach the material with patience and mutual trust. The horns add color without crowding the arrangements, Cardenas and Goldstein outline the harmony, and Nussbaum keeps the time flexible. Swallow’s distinctive electric bass moves through the ensemble with unforced grace. He rarely demands the foreground, but the group continually turns around the quiet authority of his phrasing. No one treats space as something that must be filled, and that shared worldview gives the performances much of their character.

Recorded at Sear Sound in New York in September 2024, Winter Songs suggests a warm room in a cold climate. Fluid swing, reflective balladry, and chamber-like precision coexist throughout. The improvisations never mistake intensity for discovery. Instead, the music finds momentum in subtle shifts of weight, tone, and emphasis, with ideas passing naturally between the players. Its calm is active rather than static, sustained by close attention to every change in direction.

The titles, taking simple form as spelled-out numbers, leave the music open to association. “One” and “Nine,” positioned at opposite ends of the sequence, share a luminous tenderness. “One” moves with understated assurance. Rodriguez delivers a sensitive solo, and Cheek follows with what feels like a thoughtful reply. Their exchange shows how two melodic voices can meet without competing. “Nine” carries that generosity into a more spacious setting. Piano and guitar establish a delicate atmosphere before Rodriguez’s trumpet gives the piece direction and weight. Its grace comes from the ensemble’s trust: each musician holds a part of the tangram, but the complete shape emerges from their cumulative outcome.

The more rhythmically driven pieces are equally controlled. “Two” is a midtempo performance whose strengths become clearer with repeated listening. Swallow navigates its shifting harmonies so easily that their complexity feels instinctive. Goldstein finds fresh routes through the composition, while Nussbaum’s cymbals add brightness and motion. Cheek’s concise solo is especially compelling; his pauses give the phrases room to register. “Four” builds on a rounded backbeat and restrained, slow-moving funk. The horns braid their lines naturally before Goldstein explores the harmonic implications of their exchange. The groove is steady but never forceful. “Six” releases more of the energy held in reserve elsewhere, allowing Cheek to stretch across a broader emotional range. Rodriguez takes up that momentum in his own ascending solo. Even at its most animated, however, the ensemble remains disciplined.

Cardenas takes the foreground on “Five,” using light, pastel-toned voicings that add color without unnecessary density. Cheek enters with a solo that builds gradually while preserving the performance’s even keel. On “Eight,” Goldstein creates small openings in the piano texture, and Cheek responds with measured emotion. In both tracks, timbre shapes how the compositions develop.

“Three” and “Seven” lead into the album’s deepest interior. “Three” unfolds at an unhurried pace under Goldstein’s guidance, with Cardenas adding brief, pointillistic guitar figures near the end. The melody feels patient, lucid, and seasoned without calling attention to its maturity. Its force comes from clarity rather than drama, and the arrangement trusts the listener to meet it at that level. “Seven” brings Swallow most clearly into focus. He states the melody against Goldstein’s soft-pedaled chords and Cardenas’s fluid picking, creating the album’s quiet fulcrum. Swallow makes the tune sound discovered rather than declared, while Goldstein and Cardenas surround it with carefully placed details.

The numerical titles might suggest order, but Swallow uses them to emphasize relationship rather than measurement. Each piece gains meaning through the musicians’ responses to one another. The end effect is an album that is modest in presentation but substantial in feeling, a late-career statement whose assurance lies in how little it needs to insist on itself.

Mick Goodrick/Fred Hersch: Feebles, Fables and Ferns (ECM 2876)

| Tyran Grillo

Mick Goodrick/Fred Hersch
Feebles, Fables and Ferns

Mick Goodrick guitar
Fred Hersch piano
Recorded August 1988 at Classic Sound Studio, NYC
Engineer: A. T. Michael MacDonald
Remixed 2025 by Chris Allen
Original recording produced by Fred Hersch
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
An ECM Production
Release date: June 19, 2026

Recorded at Fred Hersch’s New York studio in August 1988, Feebles, Fables and Ferns documents the only recorded meeting between Hersch and guitarist Mick Goodrick, then fellow fixtures of Boston’s jazz community. Historical circumstance provides the frame, yet the deeper distinction resides in the remarkable ease of their exchange. The session carries almost none of the dust normally associated with an archival recovery. Its present tense remains intact, sealed within every pause and sudden melodic turn. Both musicians develop ideas in real time without crowding the music or steering it toward predetermined conclusions. Their attentiveness suggests a shared space in which each voice can enter fully while leaving the other unclaimed. Goodrick, an influential teacher whose sparse discography never adequately reflected his stature, is especially compelling. His quietly inventive improvising reveals why Julian Lage, Pat Metheny, Wolfgang Muthspiel, and so many other guitarists have regarded him so highly. He seems able to bend a phrase around the interior of a thought, decorating its walls without obscuring their mystery.

That rapport animates a lively program of originals, standards, and one open improvisation. Goodrick’s title composition, first heard on 1979’s In Pas(s)ing, emerges here as a compact study in interlocking lines. Hersch and Goodrick’s melodic phrases remain tight yet fluid, while rhythmically astute changes seem to discover their destination only upon reaching it.

“Falling Grace,” one of two Steve Swallow tunes in the set, brings a livelier angle to that exchange. Retaining its composer’s crooked smile, it folds playfulness into sardonic self-awareness while maintaining considerable lyrical poise. Hersch answers that wit with buoyant precision, while Goodrick phrases across it from oblique vantage points, tugging at the seams without tearing the fabric. Swallow’s “Amazing” later enters through Goodrick’s “Away 10,” moving through dimly illuminated memories that appear to recognize us before we recognize them. What was laid down casually in a studio nearly four decades ago has acquired meanings unavailable to its creators, proving that music can continue thinking after its makers have left the room. Time has not merely preserved these performances but has collaborated with them.

Within that expanding temporal space, “Five Excursions” unfolds as a surreal yet welcoming chain of improvisations. Its tentative beginnings resemble a constellation being plotted by instruments uncertain of the sky behind them. A few pinpointed tones establish provisional coordinates, after which the music opens into interlocking geometries. Hersch and Goodrick appear to reverse-engineer causes for effects already hovering in the air. Silence becomes a working material rather than an interruption, allowing each idea to cast a longer shadow.

As Johnny Green’s “Out of Nowhere” blossoms into the foreground, the album enters a region of crystalline wit evocative of Chick Corea’s ECM classics. Clever syncopation and deft motivic interchange make the performance feel perpetually on the verge of levitation. Hersch rearranges the tune’s internal gravity while Goodrick sends bright phrases skimming along its altered surface, each musician alert to the comic potential inside sophistication.

Hersch’s “Heartsong” draws the session toward a more openly radiant center. The composition pumps richness through its chambers, yet its emotional amplitude remains governed by a profound introversion. Goodrick understands how much the tune contains and resists the temptation to excavate everything at once. Even during his fastest lines, every note retains a private place in the larger design. Hersch, for his part, stays within reach, grounding uplift in touch and harmonic clarity.

Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes,” originally written with John Coltrane’s sound in mind, offers a final field of inquiry for instruments far removed from that conception. Guitar and piano open from within, allowing secrets to emerge as subtle alterations of perspective. Goodrick homes in on details that another improviser might treat as mere filler. Minute changes in the harmonic terrain acquire enormous consequence beneath his attention, with a bent inflection or delayed resolution suddenly becoming the axis around which the piece turns. Hersch’s lyricism operates simultaneously inside the drama and beyond its frame. He inhabits the melody while quietly altering the conditions under which it can be understood.

Feebles, Fables and Ferns stands as an unusually intimate portrait of two restless musical minds meeting on equal terms. Its archival unearthing offers more than access to a lost session; it returns a form of attention that now feels almost radical. Hersch and Goodrick listen without attempting to absorb one another, preserving difference as the very substance of communion. Their duetting gradually becomes a demonstration that freedom can deepen when another consciousness is fully present.

Ayumi Tanaka: Windflower (ECM 2859)

| Tyran Grillo

Ayumi Tanaka
Windflower

Ayumi Tanaka piano
Thomas Morgan double bass
Thomas Strønen drums
Recorded May 2025, Studios La Buissonne
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Mixed by Manfred Eicher and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
in Munich, 2026
Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: August 21, 2026

The central tension on Windflower arises from our instinct to separate composition from improvisation, a distinction the music quietly renders distant. Japanese pianist Ayumi Tanaka is joined by American bassist Thomas Morgan, while Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen completes a trio new in configuration yet deeply immersed in a shared exploratory language. Their pieces carry the poise of chamber music without surrendering jazz’s reflexive instincts. Each sound enters as a proposal whose meaning depends upon the answer it receives. Eight tracks were created spontaneously, while the bandleader’s “La Source” is opened like a book being read for the second time.

The title track gathers itself from fragrance and air, an entity whose roots appear to descend into a realm just beyond sight. The musicians stretch the frame until its concealed margins become visible. Strønen’s broad percussive sweep clears a path for Morgan, whose bass advances with the grave patience of footsteps crossing an abandoned interior. Tanaka occupies the unstable space between them. Her notes become shadows cast by objects that have not yet entered the room, and time loses its familiar sequence beneath her touch. Human narrative briefly falls short of consummation, leaving an opening through which another consciousness might discover the courage to live without inherited conclusions.

“La Source” enters that opening and converts it into a wellspring. Tanaka moves through a landscape of paper and ink, revealing the literary temperament at the center of her playing. Her phrases possess character development without characters; their plots become aware of themselves midway through unfolding and quietly revise the conditions of their existence. The trio moves as one body, viscous enough to retain memory yet open enough to admit illumination. Morgan gives the music a subterranean grammar, while Strønen punctuates its margins with marks written in disappearing ink. Above them, Tanaka touches the bellies of clouds only briefly, allowing us to experience descent as a slow-motion revelation.

The arboreal density of “From Us, To You” initially complicates the generosity promised by its title. Its canopy has grown thick with intervals and crosscurrents, yet nothing within it feels oppressive. The track offers shelter through bewilderment, inviting the listener to relinquish the fantasy that clarity must precede belonging. Strønen brushes against the bark of the piece, Morgan works among its roots, and Tanaka sends new shoots into an unseen height. Their revelry remains disciplined by an almost ceremonial attentiveness. When the ending bends toward the blues, it offers a secret door inside an old wound.

“Tree of Stars” passes through that door and discovers the canopy opening onto a vast celestial field. The title collapses the distance between root and constellation, giving the heavens a dark trunk through which their light can travel. Morgan’s sleepwalking bass acquires an oneiric eloquence, wandering without losing the invisible thread that binds it to the ensemble. Tanaka offers the melodic calm of a lullaby remembered by someone who never heard it in childhood. Along the periphery, Strønen’s accents shape time through delicate pressure, preventing repose from becoming stasis. The trio seems to understand that tenderness requires structure, since even a dream needs a body sturdy enough to contain its impossible architecture.

“Weaving” carries this architecture into finer and stranger materials. Its web refuses symmetry, behaving instead as a stained-glass window whose only pigment is air. There is no fixed center. Meaning travels across the strands whenever an opportunity for nourishment draws the whole design into sudden focus. Strønen’s delicate yet restless brushing becomes the vibration of a trapped insect transmitting distress through an instrument of extraordinary beauty. Within that signal lies a stubborn promise of life. Tanaka answers with fragments that catch the light, while Morgan lends anchorage to a structure built from near-weightlessness. The performance turns fragility into a method of perception: what trembles most intensely may also be what understands its surroundings best.

That sensitivity reaches a more turbulent form in “The Sea Is Still.” Strønen’s gift for color and texture rises to the surface, inspiring richly unsettled pianism from Tanaka. The title’s stillness becomes an irony too immense to remain verbal. Every wave appears to contain its own disappearance, and Tanaka follows each crest toward the point where motion begins to erase its maker. Morgan descends beneath the agitation, sounding out depths the piano can reveal only through pressure. The waters eventually yield treasure without value, an object freed from commerce because no language can decide what it is.

“Spring” turns the album’s flowing imagery toward ambiguity. Its title hovers between season and source, while the music inhabits both meanings without selecting one. Renewal emerges as pressure beneath the surface, a force searching for the smallest fissure through which to become visible. Tanaka’s phrases rise with lucid delicacy, then disperse before their outlines can be claimed. Morgan and Strønen give the piece an earthen resistance, ensuring that every emergence retains some knowledge of what confined it. In the final droplets, a rock formation appears bereft of foothold. Suspension becomes a destination in its own right, a ledge constructed from the absence of ground.

“Driftwood” begins with Morgan’s lumbering bass calling the other instruments into earshot. The image develops at the pace of an old film learning to adapt to new projectors. Energy accumulates until a nearly grooving current takes hold, though settlement remains impossible. Tanaka wanders across it with sovereign uncertainty, resisting every invitation to make the track more obedient than it wishes to be. Her independence never fractures the ensemble. Instead, it gives the shared motion a deeper integrity, since togetherness here depends upon each musician preserving the solitude from which genuine response becomes possible. Driftwood carries a history of forests without remaining a tree. The trio similarly allows form to remember its origins while releasing any obligation to return to them.

“The Dissolving Sun” brings the album’s inquiry into its most tender and unsettling light. Tanaka’s beautifully angular pianism loosens by degrees. A forlorn finality hovers at the fringe of consciousness, prepared to extinguish itself before the moon can formulate an objection. Morgan gives the vanishing body a final gravity, while Strønen traces the delicate perimeter where radiance relinquishes its name. Yet dissolution here carries no promise of transcendence. Instead, it must give itself over to the possibility that its veracity depends on another’s awareness.

In that surrender, Windflower reveals an ethical dimension within. Improvisation becomes the practice of entering another person’s uncertainty without colonizing it, while composition offers a structure strong enough to protect that encounter. Perhaps every life arrives as written material and survives through the ways others decline to play it exactly. The trio’s deepest lesson concerns neither freedom nor fate alone, but the care required to touch an incomplete statement without deciding how it must end.

Wolfgang Muthspiel Review for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for All About Jazz documents my thoughts on this phenomenal new album by Wolfgang Muthspiel’s “Chamber Trio,” featuring trumpeter Mario Rom and pianist Colin Vallon alongside the guitarist. Drummerless jazz of the highest order that fans of Muthspiel’s work on ECM won’t want to miss. Click the cover below to read more.