Trio Ecm

Berlin-based pianist Julia Hülsmann returns to the trio format for Sooner And Later, an album which distils the experience of journeys to distant destinations. In the last couple of years Hülsmann, bassist Marc Muellbauer and drummer Heinrich Köbberling have taken their music around the world, from Europe to the US, Canada, Peru, Central Asia and China, “where something special developed. It helped to open up new sonic territory for us”

Would that it were possible to give a debut recording a higher rating. The Trio Mediaeval is a remarkable group of women from Scandanavia whose repertoire consists of contemporary works and medieval compositions, as well as Baroque church music. This recording comprises a Messe de Tournai of polyphonic mass movements from a 14th century text and is interspersed with motets and songs from roughly the same period, including a number of works from English manuscripts.

Stanley Cowell Trio - Illusion Suite (1972) {ECM Japan POCJ-2793 rel 1999}
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© 1972, 1999 ECM Records | Japan Issue | POCJ-2793
Jazz / Post Bop / Hard Bop / Piano Trio

Six trio selections by the Stanley Cowell Trio, featuring Stanley Clarke on bass and Jimmy Hopps on skins. Elastic and flowing best describe the mellow "Maimoun"; Cowell's crisp keyboarding is determined and feisty, and Clarke's dark, moody bass solo consummates the excursion. Cowell and Clarke display amazing technique on "Ibn Mukhtarr Mustapha," and Hopps' impressionistic drumming is head clearing.

On the album Opening, Tord Gustavsen reveals a fresh angle to his particularly unique trio investigations into Scandinavian folk hymns, gospel, chorale and jazz, as he introduces a different voice on bass. With a new fellow-traveller on board and its recording premiere in Lugano's Auditorio Stelio Molo, the trio discovers inspired new ways to interact with each other, using innovative approaches to sound and technique in the process. Made up in equal parts of intricately textured improvisations and understated melodic hooks, the group’s conversations bring an enticing unfamiliarity to the language the Norwegian pianist has developed over almost two decades of collaboration with ECM.

Trio shares with many ECM albums the rapt, pensive, atmospheric, after-midnight aura for which producer Manfred Eicher is famous. But strikingly fresh are the moment-by-moment melodic epiphanies, the music's elusive implications of harmony and the tunes' flowing organic forms discovered by three equally important instruments.

Italian pianist and composer Stefano Battaglia has recorded three previous offerings for ECM, all in different settings. Interestingly, The River of Anyder is his first to feature his trio, with bassist Salvatore Maiore and drummer/percussionist Roberto Dani. Battaglia, formerly a classical pianist, approaches composition and improvisation from that vantage point. When he does enter the jazz realm, it is through Italy's own grand jazz tradition from the '70s era on.

Imprint is the second ECM album by Germany’s Julia Hülsmann Trio, and a follow-up to the critically-lauded The End of a Summer, the group’s ECM debut released in 2008. Both as a player and writer Hülsmann conveys a sense of poetic compression. Her themes stand out in stark relief, as if stamped or printed into the surrounding improvisation, and are highly memorable. She says: “My music is all about melody. It’s that simple”

Since they started in the early 1970’s, ECM has been giving the world one excellent jazz piano disc after another–significant names include Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, and Paul Bley, more recently Anat Fort, Bo Stenson, and now Julia Hulsmann. Leading a trio on her ECM debut, THE END OF SUMMER, Hulsman displays a graceful, muted, and melancholy air. In the manner of Stenson and Bley, Hulsmann expresses maximum emotion and mood using the fewest (but well-placed) notes. Unlike the aforementioned gentlemen however, Hulsmann favors almost folk-like, affable, and concise melodies. Her bassist and drummer seem subdued at times, but they’re constantly lending the tunes a sense of forward motion.