Effortless Conversation

In 2016, Austrian guitarist and composer Wolfgang Muthspiel released the widely celebrated quintet offering Rising Grace as his sophomore effort for ECM. Its meditative – and sometimes oblique – compositions were riven with smooth, percolating grooves and an intelligent, canny conversation among the players, thanks in no small part to the musicians recording live in the same room. Muthspiel returns to the same French studio with three of those sidemen – pianist Brad Mehldau, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and bassist Larry Grenadier – with Eric Harland replacing Brian Blade on drums. Just as on Rising Grace, Muthspiel penned all but one of these eight tunes, with "Blueshead" composed by Mehldau. The guitarist uses electric and acoustic instruments in tunes that reveal the conversational m.o. of this band…