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Posts tagged ‘ECM Records’

Apr 3

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In the gallery

Giovanni Guidi TrioArt galleries can be good places to listen to creative music, and the small Rosenfeld Porcini gallery in London — in Fitzrovia, actually, with entrances in Rathbone Street and Newman Street — provided a near-perfect environment for last night’s concert by the trio of the young Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi, who has yet to become well known but is one of the most interesting musicians on the current European jazz scene.

Along with the American bassist Thomas Morgan and the Portuguese drummer João Lobo, Guidi was celebrating the release of This Is the Day, the trio’s second album for ECM. On its cover is a painting by the French artist Emmanuel Barcilon, who exhibits at Rosenfeld Porcini. Over the last couple of years Guidi has twice given solo recitals at the gallery, but this was the first time the trio has been heard in the UK.

The album is a thing of great beauty (as was its predecessor, City of Broken Dreams, which made my best-of-2013 list), displaying three musicians bringing new thoughts to a familiar format. While Guidi applies his restrained yet ardent lyricism and super-refined touch to melodies that sometimes resemble children’s hymns and to improvisations that drift and reshape themselves like high clouds, Morgan and Lobo provide something more than commentary. These are three-way conversations conducted with a wonderful collective sense of space. The drummer occasionally intervenes to spike the mood of romanticism with the astringency of scraped cymbals or dry rattling sounds. The bassist provides a running counterpoint that can move gently into the foreground.

But, as so often, live performance brought the music fully to life, allowing them to enhance the gorgeous cadences of Guidi compositions such as “Where They’d Lived” and “The Night It Rained Forever” and to dwell on the quiet sensuality of their version of the old favourite “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”, written in the 1940s by the Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés.

This was the second time I’ve seen Thomas Morgan play live (the first was with Tomasz Stanko’s quartet two years ago) and it confirmed the first impression that he is a genuinely original musician. Over the last three or four years he’s become virtually ECM’s house bassist, turning in discreetly outstanding performances on albums by Masabumi Kikuchi, Enrico Rava, John Abercrombie, David Virelles, Craig Taborn and Jakob Bro, but Guidi’s group offers him the ideal environment for the full expression of his special gift.

On the face of it, he is a member of a generation of jazz bassists who’ve moved away from the ideal of technical virtuosity embodied by Scott LaFaro and Ron Carter, two great players whose influence became, through no fault of their own, overbearing and destructive. Now we hear more from bassists like Larry Grenadier — a member of Brad Mehldau’s trio for the past 20 years — and Olie Brice, who take their cue instead from the likes of Wilbur Ware and Charlie Haden and seem to believe that playing as fast and high as possible is not necessarily a desirable ambition. Morgan belongs in that camp, but he has something very different.

Born in California 1981, a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, he has the air of a shy schoolboy who is still in the early stages of learning his instrument. If you watched him through soundproof glass, you would think that his playing was awkward, diffident, even indecisive. His fingers shape themselves for a note or a phrase, hover over the strings, and then appear to change their mind. Remove that glass and you discover that his note choices, while unpredictable and surprising, are almost always perfect. He has a lovely command of tone: the true sound of the instrument, beautifully shaded, full of humanity. If a note doesn’t need to be played, you can see him deciding to leave it out. His combination of resolute modesty and emotional directness will inevitably remind listeners of Haden, but it comes from a different and very intriguing place.

This Is The Day offers the best possible showcase for his qualities, but it works so well only because this is a balanced trio in which the parts function together perfectly, the individual contributions shining all the brighter for the richness of the interplay. Much of the music is played in tempo rubato, free of strict time, swelling and receding with a collective instinct for pulse and flow; there was one busy passage, however, in which they seemed to be hurtling forward together in metred time, and you had to listen hard to discover that this was a brilliant illusion.

Last night’s performance was the final date of a short European tour. The sustained warmth of the London audience’s response, which seemed to surprise and delight them (and led to a perfect encore with a dead-slow version of “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”), can only have encouraged them to continue their remarkable work together.

* The photograph of the Giovanni Guidi Trio is from the insert of This Is the Day, and was taken by Caterina di Perri.

Jan 10

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The last of Kenny

Kenny Wheeler Songs for QuintetFor a while, at the beginning, I was put off by the seemingly flawless surface of Kenny Wheeler’s music. That swooping, soaring, almost frictionless lyricism that poured from his trumpet seemed too good to be true, and I couldn’t find the humanity in it. Eventually I began to comprehend the subtle nature of Kenny’s very personal conception and, having finally got the point, joined the many who admired him so greatly.

His death last September, at the age of 84, provoked mourning and tributes around the world. Then came the news that, nine months earlier, and already ailing, he had gone into a London studio to record a last album with four of his regular musical companions: the tenor saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, the guitarist John Parricelli, the bassist Chris Laurence and the drummer Martin France.

That album, Songs for Quintet, is released this month on the ECM label, for whom he recorded on and off for 40 years, and we must thank the producers of the session, Manfred Eicher and Steve Lake, for the decision to take this final opportunity to capture Kenny’s spirit on record.

His strength was beginning to go, but the unfamiliar sense of vulnerability that occasionally shows in his work — on flugelhorn only throughout the album’s nine pieces — never obstructs the music’s clarity or emotional impact. You would not want to miss his opening statement on “The Long Waiting”, a most elegant ballad, or the way he vaults into the theme of “Sly Eyes” over France’s parade-ground snare drum.

In any case, this is a record of a group playing Kenny’s tunes, so gorgeously stimulating for improvisers, rather than a showcase for the leader’s playing. One or two are familiar from earlier records, but all confirm the impression that other musicians will be exploring their glowing contours for many years to come. Here they draw a wonderful response from each of the musicians but in particular from Sulzmann, a collaborator for many years: a quiet presence with a gift for locating the essence of each composition and never playing a wasted note, he supports and sometimes takes the initiative in what may be a career-best performance.

As a graceful coda to a wonderful career, Songs for Quintet is not to be missed by anyone who ever fell under Kenny’s spell, however belatedly.

* The photograph of Kenny Wheeler was taken by Caroline Forbes at the Abbey Road studios during the Songs for Quintet sessions in December 2013 and appears in the album insert.

Apr 2

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Paul Bley: alone, again

Paul Bley

As a solo pianist, Paul Bley is a bit of a specialised taste. He doesn’t hypnotise like Keith Jarrett at his best or set the nerves jangling like Cecil Taylor, but his performances create a very distinctive universe in which substance triumphs over obvious displays of emotion or virtuosity. Astringent in tone and devoid of mannerisms, they make you listen closer and better. And here comes another one.

It was the appearance of a couple of records by the Canadian in the initial batches of releases from the ECM label at the beginning of the 1970s that persuaded me the new Munich-based independent label would be worth watching. Those albums, Paul Bley with Gary Peacock and Ballads, were trio sessions recorded by Bley himself in New York a few years earlier and entrusted to Manfred Eicher, ECM’s founder. The first Bley album actually recorded under Eicher’s supervision, with Jan Erik Kongshaug at the controls in Oslo’s Arne Bendicksen studio, came out in 1973. Titled Open, To Love, it was an intriguing solo recital of tunes by Bley and two of his former wives, Carla Bley and Annette Peacock.

Bley has since made many albums for other labels, such as SteepleChase, Soul Note and his own IAI imprint, but ECM’s standards of recording and presentation fit him perfectly. In fact I’ve always felt that his personal aesthetic — refined and somewhat austere but not lacking in passion or swing — helped define that of Eicher’s project. His new album, Play Blue, finds him returning to Oslo, but this time to the Kulturkirken Jakob, a 19th century church turned into an arts centre, where this live recording was made in 2008.

He is 81 now and was 76 when the concert took place, but his playing retains all the fine judgement of line and time and the tensile strength that distinguished the work of his earlier years, along with an exquisite and wholly characteristic ability to skirt the fringes of dissonance. If you were to play this and Open, To Love to someone who had never heard him before, I would defy them to say which was by a man in his fourth decade, and which by one in his eighth.

The record consists of four of Bley’s own compositions and an encore of Sonny Rollins’s “Pent-up House”. “Far North” and “Way Down South Suite”, 17 and 16 minutes long respectively, merge into each other without a break and are intense, discursive pieces full of movement and surprise, kaleidoscopic in their effect on the listener. But I love the more concise “Flame” and “Longer”, which display his unsentimental way with the material of a ballad. I can’t think of another pianist so effective at creating drama by alternating legato and staccato phrases — sometimes within the same arc — while sustaining a strong underlying lyricism, and his wonderfully precise touch is beautifully captured by the recording (four decades after his first ECM session, Kongshaug is once again the engineer).

Bley neither ingratiates himself nor sets out to shock. He just plays, with a sinewy restlessness and an apparently inexhaustible fund of ideas, and he has spent his long career proving that a natural reserve and an innate warmth are not mutually exclusive. I’m pretty sure this will be one of my albums of the year.

* The photograph of Paul Bley is from the sleeve of Play Blue and was taken by Carol Goss.