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July 10 , 2007
Coming Soon from ECM
Jazz and improvised releases from ECM this autumn include the following discs:
Manu Katché
Playground
Mathias Eick: trumpet
Trygve Seim: tenor and soprano saxophones
Marcin Wasilewski: piano
Slawomir Kurkiewicsz: double-bass
Manu Katché: drums
ECM 2016
Eagerly awaited second ECM album by French-African drummer Manu Katché. Recorded in New York’s Avatar Studio in January 2007, “Playground” picks up where the popular “Neighbourhood” left off: in the interim the project has coalesced into a rip-roaring and fully-integrated band. Manu’s group, featuring a Polish/Norwegian confederacy of young players, is energized by his hard driving drums and by his compositions, which invite spirited solos... Together, the quintet - whose strong new frontline features Mathias Eick and Trygve Seim - makes exciting, zestful music.
Release: September 2007
Keith Jarrett
Gary Peacock
Jack DeJohnette
My Foolish Heart
ECM 2021/2
Jarrett/Peacock/DeJohnette live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2001, still finding gems in the rich seams of the standard mines: a great trio at the top of its game in gleaming new spontaneous arrangements of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight No Chaser”, Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehaving”, Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo”, Gerry Mulligan’s “Five Brothers”, Miles Davis’s “Four” and more, as well as Tin Pan Alley evergreens including “My Foolish Heart”, “The Song Is You”, “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry” and “Only The Lonely”. A great performance, touching on much of the history of jazz.
Release: October 2007
Enrico Rava/Stefano Bollani
The Third Man
Enrico Rava: trumpet
Stefano Bollani: piano
ECM 2020
They have been playing together since the early 1990s, Bollani hailing trumpeter Rava as his mentor, and Rava regarding Bollani as “perhaps the most gifted pianist since Art Tatum”. After Rava’s highly acclaimed “Easy Living” (quintet featuring Bollani) and the Rava/Bollani/Paul Motian collaboration “Tati”, comes this superb duo set, recorded in Lugano in November 2006. Marvellous linear playing, beautiful melodies plucked from the air, two great Italian improvisers making freely lyrical jazz together.
Release: November 2007
Jon Balke
Book of Velocities
Jon Balke: piano
ECM 2010
Norwegian pianist Jon Balke’s first-ever solo disc is a remarkable ‘book’ of 19 short pieces, grouped into four chapters and an epilogue, of music composed and improvised, exploring a whole vocabulary of ideas, techniques, rhythms, textures and sound-colours. Resembling no other disc in the solo piano genre, this is another strikingly original release from the instigator of the Magnetic North Orchestra and Batagraf.
Release October 2007
Wolfert Brederode
Currents
Claudio Puntin: clarinets
Wolfert Brederode: piano
Mats Eilertsen : double-bass
Samuel Rohrer : drums
ECM 2004
The gentle pulsations of the piano of Wolfert Brederode (born 1974) have played a supportive role on the ECM recordings of Susanne Abbuehl. Now the Dutch keyboardist leads a pan-European group of similar gifted young players, who commit their improvisational energies to the lyric flow of his music. Mats Eilertsen, leading Norwegian bassist already heard on ECM discs with the Source, Parish and Jacob Young, has a pivotal role to play, mediating between percussionist Samuel Rohrer (also from Abbuehl’s band) and clarinettist Claudio Puntin, whose resumé has included work with artists from the Ensemble Modern to Fred Frith, and whose first ECM leader disc, “Ylir”, was issued in 2000.
Release: November 2007
Jacob Young
Sideways
Jacob Young: guitar
Mathias Eick: trumpet
Vidar Johansen: tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
Mats Eilertsen: double-bass
Jon Christensen: drums
ECM 1997
Second album by Norwegian/American guitarist Jacob Young features the working band first heard on “Evening Falls”, a group established to reflect the compatible styles and ideas of three generations of Norwegian jazz players, the age range of the band stretching from 28 (prizewinning trumpeter Matthias Eick) to 64 (veteran drumming genius Jon Christensen). For the group Young writes songs “ with a lot of room for melodic interplay and improvisation” . This time we also get to hear more of Young’s highly attractive acoustic guitar playing, featured on much of the album.
Release: November 2007
Forthcoming from WATT:
Carla Bley
The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu
Paolo Fresu: trumpet
Andy Sheppard: tenor saxophone
Carla Bley: piano
Steve Swallow: bass
Billy Drummond: drums
WATT 34
"While trying to write new music for The Lost Chords, I kept hearing a trumpet. It wasn't the usual trumpet sound I hear when I write for Big Band. It was elegant and eloquent. Earthy yet ethereal. Suddenly I could hear this beautiful sound leaking out of Andy' Sheppard’s headphones. I realized it was Paolo Fresu." Carla Bley did the obvious thing, inviting the Italian trumpeter to join her group for a recording at Gérard de Haro’s Studios La Buisonne near Avignon, and on the European tour to mark its release.
Release: October 2007
ECM REISSUES
Dewey Redman
The Struggle Continues
Dewey Redman tenor saxophone
Charles Eubanks piano
Mark Helias double-bass
Ed Blackwell drums
ECM 1225
“A solid, thoughtfully-programmed showcase for one of the most capable and encyclopedic of modern saxophone stylists. Mr . Redman has a warmly commanding rsound and a broad idiomatic range, from ballad lyricism to bebop chord changes to modal playing to free-form. The news here is his growth as a composer and his ability to focus the energies of a band sparked by the great Ed Blackwell on drums.” So wrote the New York Times in 1983 of Dewey Redman’s “The Struggle Continues”, a disc that followed powerful Redman performances on ECM with Keith Jarrett’s ‘American Quartet’ and the Old And New Dreams band. Redman’s quartet repertoire, largely written by the leader, is capped by a tune from another great saxophonist: “Dewey Square” by Charlie Parker. Recorded 1982, and never before released on CD.
Release: August 2007
Bennie Maupin
The Jewel In The Lotus
Bennie Maupin reeds, voice , glockenspiel
Herbie Hancock piano, electric piano
Buster Williams basses
Frederick Waits drums, marimba
Billy Hart drums
Bill Summers percussion
Charles Sullivan trumpet
ECM 1043
Bennie Maupin has been a musicians’ musician for decades, and a highly inventive contributor, on bass clarinet and saxes, to some important records – including Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew”, Herbie Hancock’s “Mwandishi” and Marion Brown’s “Afternoon of A Georgia Faun” (ECM, 1970), and sessions with Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner and dozens more. His recordings as a leader, however, have been infrequent. All the more reason to celebrate the return of this album to the catalogue, Maupin’s very first leader date, now making its debut appearance on CD. “A more selfless album is hard to imagine”, said Down Beat in 1975. “On ‘The Jewel In The Lotus’, the sound is supreme, and all the players strive to achieve a thorough blending”. Produced by Manfred Eicher in New York in 1974, the disc’s personnel is drawn from the circle around Herbie Hancock in the period, but the music has a character all its own, and still sounds entirely contemporary.
Release: August 2007
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