Trio Ecm

Sinikka Langeland - The Magical Forest (2016) {ECM 2448}
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© 2016 ECM Records | ECM 2448 / 477 6831
Jazz / Folk / Nordic Traditions / Finnish Folk / Improvisation / Avant-Garde Jazz

The colours of The Magical Forest glow in this remarkable recording which brings together Sinikka Langeland’s Norwegian-Finnish-Swedish Starflowers quintet with the singers of the Trio Mediӕval. It’s an inspired concept: the Trio Mediӕval, with their affinity for folk music and their unique vocal blend, adapt themselves ideally to Sinikka’s sound-world, which is once archaic, timeless and contemporary. The quintet members, all bandleaders in their own right, are amongst the most characterful players in Scandinavia today, and Sinikka sets them free to improvise around her cycle of songs, built upon myths and legends of the world tree. The Magical Forest was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in February 2015, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The legendary Keith Jarrett Trio, playing live at NDR Funkhaus, Hamburg. The trio with Haden and Motian – formed in 1966 – was Jarrett’s first great band, his choice of players a masterstroke. With the bassist who had learned his craft in Ornette Coleman’s band, and the drummer from Bill Evans’s ground-breaking trio, Jarrett was able to explore the full scope of modern jazz, from poetic balladry to hard-swinging time-playing to ferocious and fiery free music, the improvisation including episodes with Keith on soprano sax. The interaction between the three musicians is uncanny throughout, reaching a peak in an emotion-drenched performance of Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che”. ECM set up the 1972 tour of the Jarrett Trio, including the German radio concert from which this album is drawn. Manfred Eicher returned to the original tapes, remixing the music for this edition in Oslo in July 2014, together with Jan Erik Kongshaug.

Though Gefion is Jakob Bro's debut as a leader for ECM, the guitarist is a seasoned veteran in the recording studio. The Danish guitarist has been releasing under his own name for the Loveland label since 2003. He has also recorded on ECM before, first as a member of Paul Motian's band for 2006's Garden of Eden (the great drummer later returned the favor on one of Bro's records), and as part of Tomasz Stanko's group for 2009's Dark Eyes. Bassist Thomas Morgan has played on a couple of the guitarist's recordings over the past six years and appeared on Stanko's 2013 date Wislawa. Jon Christensen, the veteran drummer whose free-floating, whispering restraint has made him iconic, played with Stanko in the latter years of the 20th century.

Enjoy three A-list players teaming up to celebrate the sorties into the wilder reaches of jazz-rock made by Tony Williams’s band, Lifetime. John Scofield is at his bluesy best vying with the versatile Hammond of Larry Goldings, Jack DeJohnette on drums is a precise mix of grace and fire.

Wisdom and wistfulness are intertwined in “Wisteria”, whose title track, written by Art Farmer, takes us back to the early 60s, when both Steve Kuhn and Steve Swallow sang softly of the blues in the trumpeter-flugelhornist’s band. They’ve shared a lot of history since then. Swallow played on Kuhn’s classic “Trance”; Kuhn played on Swallow’s “Home” and “So There”. Drummer Joey Baron has been heard with Kuhn on ECM discs including “Remembering Tomorrow” and the dazzling tribute disc “Mostly Coltrane”. This new album takes a fresh look at several pieces heard in Kuhn’s orchestral “Promises Kept” collection, but alongside the aching balladry there is also some driving hard bop (on “A Likely Story”) , a brace of Swallow tunes (“Dark Glasses”), Carla Bley’s gospel-tinged “Permanent Wave” and the Brazilian “Romance” by Dori Caymmi.

The gathering of this trio in February of 2000 guaranteed little except that they had demonstrated ably – on Nothing Ever Was Anyway: The Music of Annette Peacock – the ability to play together almost symbiotically. This follow-up attempts to extend the trio's reach across Peacock's music and into the terrain of the trio as an entity in and of itself. That said, not all the pieces here are new; in fact, some of them are decades old – Marilyn Crispell's "Rounds" is from 1981, Gary Peacock's "Voices of the Past" and "December Greenwings" are both from the early '80s, and Paul Motian's "Conception Vessel/Circle Dance" is from the early '70s. The trio brings to these vintage pieces not only new eyes, but the freshness of this relationship and the willingness to reinvent them.

Unlike the other two Keith Jarrett trio recordings from January 1983, this collaboration with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette does not feature standards. The trio performs the 30-minute "Flying" and a 6-minute "Prism," both of them Jarrett originals. "Flying," which has several sections, keeps one's interest througout while the more concise "Prism" has a beautiful melody. It is a nice change to hear Jarrett (who normally plays unaccompanied) interacting with a trio of superb players.

Bassist Arild Andersen may not be one of ECM's best-known bandleaders (to Americans, that is), but that hasn't stopped him from amassing an impressive catalog as one of the label's senior statesmen. Andersen himself comments in the liner notes at how fortunate and surprised he was when looking back over his catalog and realizing how many younger players graced his sides. The evidence, however, is that Andersen is too humble: his guidance is like a beacon in bringing the best out of many who would become leaders in their own right. A fine example is on "Vanilje," which opens the album and comes from the Masqualero album. Here Andersen, Jon Balke, and drummer Jon Christensen host two stunning players on the front line, young saxophonist Tore Brunborg and a fresh-faced Nils Petter Molvaer on trumpet.

The trio with Spanish bassist Antonio Miguel and Canadian drummer Owen Howard has been an “invariant” in the life of Berlin-based pianist Benedikt Jahnel, “a constant in a transformational period” as he puts it, and new album The Invariant is issued as the players reach their tenth anniversary as a working unit.

The music of this album is a clear example of the deep-rooted migrational nature of our local existence. It is music of a remote past, marked by radically different life conditions. It is music from distant areas connected by wandering people in search of better life conditions. It is music handed down by word of mouth for a long time and finally documented in written form during the last century. It is music to be recovered, reconstructed and re-contextualized in an ongoing process of searching, appropriating and re-inventing, of sense making at the intersection of a resonating past and today's breathing.