John Abercrombie guitar Marc Copland piano Drew Gress double bass Joey Baron drums
Recorded April 2013 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Assistant: Bob Mallory Produced by Manfred Eicher
If ever there was, as this album’s sole free improvisation would phrase it, a “Shadow Of A Doubt” of John Abercrombie’s prowess, then here is fiercely understated confirmation of his staying power. Despite sitting atop a career spanning decades, the guitarist sounds as youthful and buoyant as ever, yet with a reflective edge that comes only with experience. Such is the lyrical dichotomy of 39 Steps, and all of it served by world-class engineering that gives the instruments their respective spaces but joins them through shared breath.
With bassist Drew Gress, drummer Joey Baron, and pianist Marc Copland (making his ECM debut) along for the ride, Abercrombie takes the listener on a road trip as fresh as it is nostalgic. In the latter vein are the eye-squintingly melodic “Bacharach,” the slice of chromatic brilliance called “Another Ralph’s” (a follow-up to Abercrombie’s classic tune “Ralph’s Piano Waltz”), and “As It Stands,” which feels like a cigarette burning down to the filter, the two chordists taking turns exhaling the smoke. The leader’s pen yields three more tunes. “Vertigo” is the first of a handful of Alfred Hitchcock references and opens the session with a laid-back vibe that is, given its title, surprisingly congruous (a four-dimensional take on the standard “Melancholy Baby” at the tail end feels far more off kilter). Copland eases the rest of band into focus here with an elegant intro and further contributes the album’s first noteworthy solo. Two remaining Abercrombie originals showcase the composer at his evocative best. “Greenstreet” feels like ice-skating across a winter wonderland even as it thaws in the sparkle of Baron’s cymbals, while Gress’s bass ladders adroitly, every bit as limber as the rest. The slack-jawed title track, for its part, simplifies things by opening single note before expanding into a fragrant rose. Abercrombie takes great care to strip that rose of its thorns until it can be safely handled.
Copland’s two offerings map the quartet’s brightest courses, stretching highway through the joyous “LST” and setting up the tensile atmosphere of “Spellbound” with assurance. The first tune boasts simpatico timekeeping from the rhythm section, giving Abercrombie more than enough court to lob his soaring improvisations, and in second, though more relaxed, making way for some of his most forthright playing in years.
Then again, Abercrombie has always favored tone over muscle, and here the fine tweaking of his experience pays off in spades. This is his finest album in recent memory and may just earn its place among your old favorites with repeated listens.
Jon Balke piano, keyboards, electronics, tungoné, darbouka, percussion Helge Andreas Norbakken sabar, gorong, djembe, talking drum, shakers, percussion Emilie Stoesen Christensen vocals Erland Dahlen drums Torgeir Rebolledo Pedersen poetry reading
Recorded in various locations 2009 Mixed by Olav Torget in Olav Torget’s studios Winter 2010/11 Recording producer: Jon Balke Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production
Jon Balke’s Batagraf project may feel for some to be an indecipherable thing. Yet beneath its calligraphic rib cage beats a primal language. It is both the life force of rhythm and the rhythm of life force, a generative cycle wherefrom speech unloads its dreams into the transport of a welcoming ear. At the core of this incarnation are Balke himself, percussionist Helge Andreas Norbakken, and drummer Erland Dahlen. To these the session adds the voice of jazz singer Emilie Stoesen Christensen and the poetry of Torgeir Rebolledo Pedersen, read in its original Norwegian by the author.
The latter augments some of the album’s most tetrahedral drumming, attaching roots and stems to the muted pianism of “Calmly” and shuffling its tongues in the garden of breathy synths that is “The Wind Calmer.” Further engagements include “Hundred-Handed” and analog textures of “Winds.” Balancing these are the vocals of Christensen, who in “Riddle #1” and “Riddle #2” fleshes out Batagraf’s philosophy most succinctly. These twisted songs of unanswered questions are gyroscopes forever wobbling but never falling. Unsettled rhythms and piano work their way into the subconscious, where knowledge is questioned, answers are deflated, and the clothes line from which every spoken word hangs trembles in anticipation of a new wash. As in the song “One Change,” Christensen embraces all of this as easily as she abandons recognizable words.
As for the drummers, we find them in manifold spirits in the tender “Baka #65,” and of an especially intimate mind in “Everyday Music” and “Vjup,” for the last of which Christensen embarks on a whimsical deconstruction of masculine pride. The level of psychological extraction realized here shows just how adept these musicians are with intellectual needles and sonic threads. Whether following the Jon Hassell-like current of “Tonk” or digging the IDM beat of “Azulito,” they all seem fully present in the moment. Norbakken’s concluding yet inconclusive “GMBH,” the only track not written by Balke, finds even more beauty in distortions—layers of an archaeological dig, each with its own color and interlocking history. By unbinding words from their referents, they learn to swim with the minnows.
Mark Turner’s tenor is a singular voice in modern jazz. He is that rare saxophonist who eschews the trend of thinking outside the box by recalibrating its inner space to the tune of freedom. Turner embodies his surname, navigating every twist and corner of whatever melody lies before him as if rafting down a brilliant stream of consciousness. On ECM, Turner has conquered some of the strongest currents of his career so far with a craft so multifaceted that even notes of chromatic scales seem worlds apart.
As a guest artist of Enrico Rava (New York Days) and Billy Hart (All Our Reasons), he has proven his unpacking abilities with uncanny assurance. As a leader, he has shown himself to be more than a musician. He is a consummate storyteller. Yet even as a storyteller he favors at least two major narrative modes, each embodied by the albums I’ve put together below.
FLY
Year Of The Snake
Mark Turner tenor saxophone Larry Grenadier double bass Jeff Ballard drums
Recorded January 2011 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: Aya Merrill
Assistant: Fernando Lodeiro
Produced by Manfred Eicher
When Turner broke out with Sky & Country, the ECM debut of his so-called FLY trio, he set up, along with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, a towering structure of expectation, the heights of which have more than doubled with Year Of The Snake. Not only have Turner and friends stepped up their game; they’ve redefined it.
Turner carries an even more sizable portion of the composing credits this time around, providing the motif for “The Western Lands” and its four variations. Its stepwise beginnings coax the trio from slumber as the sun draws in the last traces of night with its yawn. Arco bass streaks the overhead with plane trails as Turner’s coated tone pulls roots from below. In other iterations, these pieces—meant to evoke the western United States, from which all the band members originate—become increasingly haunted by their own ghosts. Brushed drums and starry percussion sketch silhouettes of autobiographical history as Turner and Grenadier divine the bones left behind. Yet before Ballard closes the circle with a cymbal meditation, there’s much in the way of visions to be had.
The strengths of each composer play to those of the other bandmates. Turner’s three main tunes, for example, highlight the bond of his rhythmatists, who ride the title track with dressage-like synergy and pull out all the stops for the aptly titled “Festival Tune.” Even Turner’s high-beam walks through “Brothersister” regain their toe line because of Grenadier and Ballard’s watchful ears. Together they scope out a massive construction site, looking for clues into the nature of improvisation—only to discover that its origins are to be found in rubble and memory. Ballard’s tunes front dialogues of reed and bass. From the artfully geometric “Diorite” to the slicker “Benji,” melodies leap from the fingers like cats. Turner, for his part, generally sticks to the higher end of the horn on this set, digging for grit only when required, as on “Salt And Pepper,” a noir-ish track that is a bass-lover’s dream.
The biggest revelation here, however, is Grenadier’s “Kingston.” Something of a sectional track, it links a chain of solos and duos before latching on to a groovy backbeat. Turner runs wild with inspiration here, running up the thematic latter and mulching it into a thousand pieces. Transgressing one unexpected horizon after another, he rejoins Grenadier over a spiraling train track of destiny. Like the album as a whole, it is as much a leap of evolution as intuition for the trio and a significant exposition of what jazz can be when allowed to roam.
(To hear samples of Year Of The Snake, click here.)
Mark Turner Quartet
Lathe of Heaven
Mark Turner tenor saxophone Avishai Cohen trumpet Joe Martin double bass Marcus Gilmore drums
Recorded June 2013 at Avatar Studios, New York
Engineer: James A. Farber
Assistant engineer: Akihiro Nishimura
Mixed January 2014 by James A. Farber, Manfred Eicher and Mark Turner
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Turner’s first nominal leader date for ECM is an altogether different animal. Named after a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, it comes across as more interested in the science than the art of storytelling. Le Guin’s tale even gives us the perfect term: HURAD, which stands for Human Utility: Research and Development. Lathe of Heaven is indeed a laboratory of sonic utility, stretching the saxophone like a DNA profile chart and plotting its growth on staves.
As befitting of an album under his name, the entire set was written and conceived by Turner as an article of mystery. The title opener sets up a fresh dynamic between Turner’s tenor and the trumpet of Avishai Cohen. Their patterning reveals compositional acumen in spades, springing to life when bassist Joe Martin and drummer Marcus Gilmore kick in their four cents. But even as the full quartet guides the listener into a brilliantly populated landscape of urban memory, it’s clear that Turner is content to build his tunes in stages. Nowhere more so than in “Year of the Rabbit.” In addition to referencing Year Of The Snake, it throws a spotlight Gilmore, who at once lays out and navigates an intricate maze of snare and cymbal. It’s not surprising that the textural blend and modal harmonies here sound like John Zorn’s Masada, especially when one considers that Cohen has dipped into that songbook’s mystical waters in the context of his Lemon Juice Quartet. Amid his flurry of filament, Turner side-winds into focus to rearticulate the theme before moving vertically. “Brother Sister 2” nods again to Snake, expanding the spinal theme of its predecessor into a more protracted nervous system of (in)tensely rubato character. It unravels the thrumming heartstrings of Martin’s bass, breathing in deeper each time until a precordial catch snaps things back into place.
The remaining pieces of the puzzle pay homage in their own right. The tense, dissonant leads of “Ethan’s Line” evoke those of dedicatee Ethan Iverson. “The Edenist,” with its locked-in rhythm section and distinct soloing, references the possessions of sci-fi author Peter F. Hamilton. Combining Cohen’s low-flying dreams and Turner’s wider talons, it claws through branches to a moral nest within. And then there’s “Sonnet for Stevie,” Turner’s spacious tribute to the blues. There’s no need for “Wonder” in this or any other title, because this album is brimming with it. So ends the tale, in anticipation of another.
If Year Of The Snake is the dawn, then Lathe of Heaven is the dusk. Together they form a most satisfying day.
How brief in time, how infinite in measure.
(To hear samples of Lathe of Heaven, watch the video above or click here.)
Keith Jarrett
Charlie Haden
Paul Motian
Hamburg ’72
Keith Jarrett piano, soprano saxophone, flute, percussion Charlie Haden double bass Paul Motian drums, percussion
NDR-Jazz-Workshop 1972
Radio producer: Michael Naura
Recording engineer: Hans-Heinrich Breitkreuz
Recorded live June 14, 1972 in Hamburg
Remixed July 12, 2014 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher
Album produced by Manfred Eicher
We may only speculate as to the untold Keith Jarrett riches still locked away in ECM’s vaults. The releases of Sleeper and, more recently, No End were but the tip of what is shaping up to be a majestic mountain indeed. Where those albums respectively showed us Jarrett’s European Quartet and homebody experiments, here lies something in between: a fearless document of a composer and improviser at the top of his game. Make that three.
We may make much of the fact that bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian are no longer with us, and that hearing them in this impervious creative triangle is like witnessing a resurrection. The trio was Jarrett’s first power group and had been in existence for six years already before the capture of this live recording at Hamburg’s NDR Funkhaus. Mixed by Manfred Eicher from the master tapes with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in 2014—one day, we learn from the album’s press release, after Haden’s death—it is now in the public ear and here to stay.
We may marvel at the nostalgic archaeology of Jarrett’s compositions, of which the thumbnail “Life, Dance” is exclusive to this album. Its breath of an intro gives the floor to Haden, who confirms mastery in less than three minutes. Haden and Jarrett slip hand-to-glove in “Everything That Lives Laments,” only now the pianist abandons keys for the spirit song of a wooden flute over Motian’s jangling percussion. Haden works the land until the piano sprouts from it like a tree. The sunny-side-up “Piece For Ornette” reminds us not only of Haden’s former tenure with Coleman, but also of what Jarrett might have been in another life: a soprano saxophonist of invention and merit. His dance finds purchase on an invigorating carpet, as laid down by attuned rhythmatists, lighting up the sky with firework potential. Motian is no less incendiary, but lights his playing as if by match to kerosene, keen to catch the ashes of Jarrett’s high-velocity chromatism in hands cupped like upturned cymbals. Lastly for this crop is “Take Me Back,” in which Haden’s echoes yield more reactive bassing. Equal parts jam band session (listen for Jarrett on tambourine for a spell before diving back into the keyboard) and gospel gush, it launches the trio into a prime, if not primal, groove.
We may further delight in the album’s outer edges. “Rainbow” opens with a hands-in-the-earth intro from Jarrett, whose first wife Margot pens the tune. In realizing the latter’s thematic structure, the full trio slides organically into place. Motian’s starry cymbals are foregrounded, while Jarrett caroms from one to another, leaving constellations in his wake. At the other end is “Song For Che,” which in this intimate, 15-minute version unclogs previously neglected arteries of interpretation. As the crowning jewel of Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, it defines personal and historic eras alike. After the leaping and lurking of Jarrett’s soprano, Haden works his arco magic to call the piano back into being before wading through the marsh alone toward closure, alive as ever.
We may do all of this and more, but forget that every act becomes part of the grander archive the moment it transpires. So while you’re enjoying this surprise dug up from the past with a glass of wine, take a moment to stare at your own reflection in that circle of burgundy and know that you are part of the music’s history as well.
Julia Hülsmann piano Tom Arthurs trumpet, flugelhorn Marc Muellbauer double bass Heinrich Köbberling drums
Recorded June 2012 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher
The harbor becomes the sea And lighting the house keeps its collision free Understand the lay of the land And don’t let it hurt you or it will be the first to –Feist
After the successes of The End Of A Summer and Imprint, pianist Julia Hülsmann joins bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling for another round, only now with new collaborator Tom Arthurs on trumpet. Arthurs is a musician whose Kenny Wheeler-like feel for color and collaborations with other ECM artists makes him an inevitable fit for the label. Thus reborn, the Julia Hülsmann Quartet leaps into action with swing and vigor.
Much of said vigor comes by way of Muellbauer, whose pen begets the album’s hippest and most atmospheric numbers in kind. In the former vein we have “Quicksilver” and “Dedication,” in which Hülsmann takes the listener on journeys of discovery. In the latter vein, “Gleim” is a noteworthy gem. Between the composer’s soothing intro and Hülsmann’s floating clusters stretches an avenue of muted trumpet, along which Arthurs walks as if humming to himself. Köbberling’s sole offering is “Forever Old,” in which the drummer skims the surface of many oceans while Muellbauer surveys the coast in Arthurs’s footsteps toward a tessellated lighthouse. “Richtung Osten,” by Köbberling’s wife Fumi Udo, throws a narrower spotlight on Muellbauer, who traces peaks and valleys over the band’s rubato mappings.
Hülsmann contributes four tunes, including the bop-leaning title track and the syllogistic highlight, “Spiel.” In each one can hear her fanning approach to improvisation, as also in the photorealistic “Snow, melting.” For more than effect, she throws in two surprises. First is “The Water,” by Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, arranged here for the trio and crafted with subtle assurance. Second is the muted “Nana,” a lullaby from Manuel de Falla’s “Siete Canciones Populares Españolas” cycle.
From beginning to end, In Full View holds true to its vision without error. Fans of the trio are sure to feel right at home among the new company, for Arthurs provides many pleasures along the way, and even an intimate tune of his own: “Forgotten Poetry.” Which is precisely what this album is not. You will want to remember every word.
(To hear samples of In Full View, watch the video above or click here.)
Aaron Parks piano
Recorded November 2011 at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA
Engineer: Rick Kwan
Mixed at Avatar Studios, New York
Produced by Sun Chung
Into the forest again whence all roads depend this way and that to lead him back. –Robert Creeley
Aaron Parks’s solo ECM debut might just as well be called “Arbor Essence.” Not only because each of its 11 improvised tracks grows however it wants to, but also because as a forest they provide shelter from rain and screen against the sun’s blinding rays. The album belongs unquestionably alongside Craig Taborn’s Avenging Angel and any number of Keith Jarrett records as a significant contribution to the solo piano archive, though it owes as much to Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Paul Bley.
With so much foliage to reckon with, it’s no wonder Parks begins “Asleep In The Forest.” The apparent expanse of his playing is only enhanced by the engineering, which places us with him among the branches, looking down at the comings and goings of fauna below and wearing moonlight like a shroud. “Toward Awakening” confirms this feeling of night in a dreamlike pulse and builds waves with a surrendering intensity not heard since The Köln Concert. Unlike that classic predecessor, this excursion bleeds in more intimate ways, shared not with an audience of flesh but a congregation of souls. An awakening, yes, but into a realization that one always returns to slumber.
Like the album as a whole, “Past Presence” is a study in contrasts, of depth-soundings and highborn prayers. It’s a fantasy novel come to life, and in which kingdoms are built on foundations of magic just as they are undone by the same. In the looming shadow of its castle is where Parks follows more robust threads of melody in “Elsewhere,” an eerily distorted ballad of seeking and forgiveness that touches the horizon like a match to candlewick. So peaceful is its skewed vision of reality that the mechanisms of “In Pursuit” come as something of a surprise. In them is a whiff of philosophy that lingers over interlocking hands, the left’s rising bass lines bolstering the right’s gossamer speech. “Squirrels” and “Branchings” are, respectively, more whimsical and poetic, while “Homestead” favors the grays and browns of an Andrew Wyeth painting, its nautilus resting beneath a billowing curtain and chambered by the will to be heard.
This is one of those quintessential ECM albums that would not have existed without the label’s tireless archive on which to build, for one will catch hints of mainstays Ketil Bjørnstad (“River Ways”) and Arvo Pärt (“A Curious Bloom”) in addition to the ones already mentioned. By expanding minds on either side of the genre fence, it bespeaks the joy of creation for any who will take it—a gift without wrapping but the embrace of a welcoming ear.
Stefano Battaglia piano Salvator Maiore bass Roberto Dani drums
Recorded April 2012, Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher
When Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities, “And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music,” one might finish: that music comes from the pen of Stefano Battaglia. Following 2011’s The River of Anyder, it was difficult to imagine that the Italian pianist’s trio with bassist Salvator Maiore and drummer Roberto Dani could ever yield a more delicate creation, but with Songways the band has done just that. It is one of the most sensitive jazz experiences available on ECM, rivaling even Tord Gustavsen’s inward glances in scope. Much of that scope has to do with Battaglia, who imbues his compositions with a characteristic wealth of literary allusions.
The album’s title track, in fact, pays homage to the same Calvino fable, and like it tells stories from different perspectives, only to realize that the language and the environments it describes are one and the same. Groovy shadings make it no less contemplative, and Maiore’s archaeological bassing assures that every melodic artifact is polished and museum ready. Maiore, in fact, glows noticeably throughout the album’s dreamiest passages, as those taken through the capital of Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput in “Mildendo Wide Song” or the twisted streets of Alfred Kubin’s “Perla.” As much a listener as a speaker, his erosions are so subtle that before you know it a river flows before you.
Battaglia, for his part, stands out in the philosophical (“Armonia,” inspired by Charles Fourier) and the surreal (“Monte Analogo,” from the book by Renée Daumal). Weaving through frames and brushes, he mines every artistic impulse until minerals have been exhausted. With increasing fervor, he paves avenues of abstract impressions. Yet the most rewarding gift of Songways is Dani. Whether brushing through Homer’s Odyssey in “Ismaro” in the wake of Battaglia’s footfalls, evoking the clock of Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional town “Vondervotteimittis” (hats off to engineer Stefano Amerio here for his miking of Dani’s cymbals), or transitioning from hands to sticks in “Babel Hymn,” his feel for tuning is ever on point.
Not only is this a brilliant album and the trio’s most thoughtful work to date; it is an experience that is sure to grow with you. This is jazz as alchemy, turning not lead into gold but gold into song.
Louis Sclavis bass clarinet, clarinet Benjamin Moussay piano, Fender Rhodes, keyboards Gilles Coronado electric guitar
Recorded September 2011, Studios La Buissonne, Pernes-les-Fontaines
Engineer: Gérard de Haro
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production
Clarinetist-composer Louis Sclavis continues his journey of self-reinvention on Sources, in trio with keyboardist Benjamin Moussay and guitarist Gilles Coronado. In the album’s press release, Sclavis notes its singularity in his personal oeuvre: “It doesn’t resemble anything else, it’s really music conceived for this group and which couldn’t exist until we played it.” With the exception of the final track, an exploratory groove by Coronado entitled “Sous influences,” the album is comprised of Sclavis originals. While shades of his characteristic edges are detectable, there is indeed something fresh about the textures of what’s being put together there.
The combination of instruments may seem afield of anything else that ECM has produced. And yet, listening to “Près d’Hagondange” and “Dresseur de nuages,” I can’t help but think of Anouar Brahem’s trio work with Jean-Louis Matinier and Françoir Couturier. Despite a marked difference in style, there is affinity of temperament. The spiraling precision of through-composed passages between clarinet and piano gives way to a muscular sort of improvisation that maintains unusual economy of spirit through virtuosity, by which the musicians don’t so much show off as revel in the possibilities of their synergy. The second tune spotlights Moussay on Fender Rhodes, droning beneath Coronado’s circuitry in a postmodern rewiring.
Yet whatever the context, nothing can disguise the sonorous abandon of Sclavis’s bass clarinet, which tears through “La Disparition” as wildly as it beautifies “A Road To Karaganda” with gentler, modal arcs over Moussay’s deeper cartographies (the pianist also excels in “A Migrant’s Day,” for which he toggles between airborne to landlocked movement). Sclavis further enhances the microscopic electronic beat of the title track and evokes river’s flow in “Along The Niger” in a flurry of brushstrokes.
If Sources were a train, it would be balancing on one set of wheels, nearly toppling over but hugging the track at every turn. The trio fuels itself with the sustenance of invention, and with it puffs steam and song without looking back. This is the spiritual successor of Sclavis at his most abstract, a mind shed of its need for fixed identity and all the freer for it.
Keith Jarrett piano Charlie Haden double bass
Recording Producer: Keith Jarrett
Recorded March 2007 at Cavelight Studio
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Mastering at MSM Studios by Manfred Eicher and Christoph Stickel
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher
Seeing as this was to be Charlie Haden’s final record, one could easy read mournful prophecy into Last Dance. To be sure, its poignancy is as heavy as the burden of the bassist’s loss. To do so, however, risks obscuring the fact that the music under its title stretches seams by virtue of an abundance of life. Born of the same sessions as Jasmine, the lovingly interpreted standards of Last Dance again find Haden in the company of pianist Keith Jarrett, who once characterized this rare partner as a musician who thinks through whatever melody comes his way.
From the first few steps of “My Old Flame,” it’s clear these two men walk not together but along complementary paths, their shadows interlocking at any point along the trajectory of a tune. And by this forlorn song’s guiding hand, held above the starving ear like that of a Reiki master, an inner heat comes through. There is an album’s worth of feeling in this opener alone, and its flame is sustained in all that follows. It sets a proportional pace of love and loss that echoes throughout “Every Time We Say Goodbye” and “It Might As Well Be Spring.” That latter brings an especially joyful yet contemplative tone to the emerging image.
Lest we fall into a homogeneous meditation, the duo adds one part spice for every two of sugar. Be they navigating the rhythmic changeups of “Dance Of The Infidels” or leaping through the sprinklers of “Everything Happens To Me,” Haden and Jarrett sand down every jagged edge they encounter. True to the title of “My Ship,” they do not soar so much as sail, opening canvas to wind and mapping its lead. Their grandest voyage is an integral take on “’Round Midnight.” In addition to Jarrett’s oceanic foundation, it boasts a superbly architected solo from Haden, who builds a spire of song, robust as a centuries-old tree at the bottom yet thin as a whisper up top.
Alternate takes of “Where Can I Go Without You” and “Goodbye” carry over from Jasmine with even grander intimacy. Despite the bittersweet core of both, they feel like new beginnings. Each is a door of appreciation opened in the listener, from which pours memories of Haden’s legacy, thus making room for new ones to come. The musicians are achingly present, even as they transcend minds toward lyrical enlightenment. They flip through the Great American Songbook not as one might a newspaper, but resolutely and sincerely, as if it were scripture.
Given the lengths of these tunes (averaging about nine minutes each), I like to think that Haden and Jarrett might have spun any of them into a lifetime of improvisation. And perhaps, in a way, they already have. They play off each other so artfully before trading a single solo that solos begin to feel more like roots than departures. No matter how virtuosic their skills, the melody remains forever paramount. This album is like one massive song that will continue to evolve even after those who left its traces have improvised their way into another plane of existence entirely. And while Last Dance may be called cinematic, it differs from cinema in one key aspect: where cinema so often concerns itself with fictional characters, here the subjects are anything but. They are so real, it almost hurts to witness their conversation.
If Jarrett is the body, Haden is the soul.
(To hear samples of Last Dance, watch the video above or click here.)
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 