Ecm Dvd

Plenty has happened since Enrico Rava last recorded with his working quintet. All but the piano chair remained stable between Easy Living (ECM, 2004) and The Words And The Days (ECM, 2007), but trombonist Gianluca Petrella is the sole remnant on Tribe. "Change is good," they say, and if the rest of Rava's quintet consists of largely fresh (and young) faces, the lack of name power shouldn't be mistaken for lack of firepower.

Fasil, based on an idea by guitarist Marc Sinan and author Marc Schiffer, tells of the life of Aisha, the great love and youngest wife of the prophet Mohammed, in the course of an inspired song cycle. The improvisations take as their inspirational starting point fragments of Koran recitations recorded by Marc Sinan in Turkey. Together with Julia Hulsmann’s songs they form an Ottoman suite, a Fasil. Highlights in this transcultural project include exceptional performances by Sinan himself, and by Yelena Kuljic in the role of Aisha. The singer was recently described by the Frankfurter Rundschau as “the most thrilling new voice in the current jazz scene.”

Together and separately these Swiss musicians, violinist Paul Giger and harpsichordist Marie-Louise Dähler present a symbiosis of old and new music that spans Bach, pulsating improvisation and strikingly original compositions. In all, a journey through musical and personal history which also, in “Bombay II”, reflects upon Giger’s years traveling in Asia. A sixth remarkable ECM album from Giger, a distinguished label debut for Dähler, and an important New Series release.

Marilyn Mazur is best known today as the flamboyant percussionist at the heart of the Jan Garbarek Group (Twelve Moons, Visible World), speeding around an ever burgeoning array of multi-ethnic metal, wood and clay instruments. Garbarek: "Marilyn is like the wind. An elemental force." Prior employers Gil Evans, Wayne Shorter, and Miles Davis have similarly valued her pervasive, penetrating percussion. Marilyn drew up the blueprint for Future Song - an American-Danish-Nowegian-Yugoslavian musical alliance - while working the stadiums with Miles in 1989 and the group has survived with intact personnel for eight years. Mazur says: "The music is intended to be like a living organism, expanding through specific dramatic sequences into more open structures. It represents a wide dynamic spectrum, explores many emotions."

"The Ground" reveals a stronger sense of purpose and a greater conceptual rigour than "Changing Places" , the trio's debut album. Without sacrificing the clear-edged melodic sensibility that can already be considered one of the hallmarks of Gustavsen’s writing, the musicians are better able to do improvise within the structure of the pieces. An immediate popular success, "The Ground" topped Norway's pop charts in its second week of release.

Khmer is surely the most unusual album ever released by ECM — unusual because the label, which is best known for elevated chamber jazz, presents the solo debut of trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer as a production that plays with modern electronica methods while not eschewing the well-known ECM aesthetic. Molvaer's music is somewhere between scary and majestic, and changes between ominous ambient sounds and hard breakbeats, along which atonal screeching guitars combined with melancholic melodies, create a fascinating melange.

John Surman (on baritone, soprano, bass clarinet and synthesizer) meets up with drummer Jack DeJohnette (who also plays congas and electric piano) for this typically introspective and spacy ECM set. Surman's playing (especially on baritone and bass clarinet) during nine group originals is worth hearing.

Jazz musicians in the main rarely take music from ancient times and advance it with improvisation, as modernity generally speaks for itself. Jan Garbarek has always been the type of performer interested in taking natural and spiritual elements from his native Norway, incorporating them into his personalized saxophone sound, but here with Rosensfole he's outdone himself, adapting historic period medieval folk songs toward a futuristic mood. The singing of Agnes Buen Garnas and Garbarek's various percussion or synthesizer sounds surround a minimal complement of tenor or soprano saxophone, reminiscent of aural imagery perhaps from the Moors, the upper atmosphere, or the cold waters of his homeland.

Jan Garbarek is, of course, one of ECM’s longest standing composers and saxophonists, yet he is first and foremost a spectacular improviser who often manages to reach farther than (I imagine) even his own expectations in touching new melodic concepts. Paired with the Spheres-like church organ of Kjell Johnsen, he plumbs the depths of spiritual and physical awareness in a way that few of his albums have since. Here more than anywhere else, he shapes reverberation into its own spiritualism, exploring every curve of his surrounding architecture, every carved piece of wood and masonry.

Ecotopia was the last album that Oregon released through the ECM label, and the first that the band - now with a new fulltime percussionist in the person of Gurtu (Walcott was never truly replaced, but continued and still does continue to inspire and propel the band ever onward). The music on the album is vivid and fresh, but like the half a dozen albums (including the ones they released up to Northwest Passage), there is a sense of mortality in the music an urgency in the tone and flow that suggests that Towner, Moore and McCandless have survived a catastrophe and are now tread softly into the future aware of the impermanence of things.