29.10.2024 | Timeline
Luminessence Lineage
Tracing the various threads that run through ECM’s catalogue, each record from the ongoing vinyl reissue series Luminessence uncovers manifold links to different albums released throughout the label’s over half-a-centruy-long history. Each album has its own lineage within ECM’s vast catalogue, offering insight into a multitude of streams from a unique point of view.
Kenny Wheeler – Gnu High
Gnu High marked Candian trumpeter Kenny Wheeler’s arrival at ECM – and as far as arrivals go, this one could be considered a statement of intent. Recorded in New York in 1975, and produced by Manfred Eicher, Gnu High brought Canadian trumpeter Wheeler to a new level of international acclaim, for both his impassioned playing and his profoundly lyrical writing.
On the album Kenny is fronting an extraordinary quartet, with Keith Jarrett, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, all masterful improvisers who had shaped their intuitive collective understanding as members of Miles Davis’s groups. “What you hear,” says Jack DeJohnette, “is the spontaneity of the moment.” Dave Holland notes that Gnu High “had this wonderful combination of the form and the shape and the harmony of Kenny’s tunes but then this really free way of interpreting them.”
Excerpt from the liner notes by Nick Smart, accompanying the Luminessence edition of the album:
Kenny and Manfred began planning his debut ECM recording for the summer of 1975. They agreed that the rhythm-section of Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette were to be joined by pianist Keith Jarrett, in what would be his last full appearance as a session player
Kenny was at the height of his powers by this time. Around fifteen years older than his three bandmates, he was a fully mature artist with something to say as both composer and instrumentalist. Kenny and Dave were already together in upstate New York that June, they wrapped up two weeks of solid rehearsals with Anthony Braxton’s quartet and headed straight to the city as the heatwave raged on. At Generation Sound Studios, in under six hours of nearly all first takes, with Tony May as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing, they put down the music whose originality would send ripples throughout the international jazz community.
The album made a lasting impression on guitarist Bill Frisell and his colleagues in Boston, where he’d also heard Kenny with Braxton’s quartet a few years earlier. Bill Frisell: “I remember so clearly that Gnu High record… Everybody was flipping out about this record, and we were all trying to play those songs and you know, it really had a huge impact… it was rare to hear someone with that scope, or that imagination. There was no one like that, there never was, or has been anyway.”
Photos by Roberto Masotti (Wheeler, Holland), Andreas Raggenbass (Dejohnette), ECM Archive (Keith Jarrett)
The cross-connections implied within Gnu High are as obvious as they are overwhelming. Wheeler would go on to record further influential albums – as leader, as part of Azimuth and as sideman to the likes of Dave Holland – for ECM, including Deer Wan, Around 6, The Widow in The Window and more, up until his very final recording Songs For Quintet of 2015. Dejohnette and Holland would reappear as the trumpeter’s rhythm section for Deer Wan (1978) and the 1984 album Double, Double You. All three of them – Wheeler, Holland and DeJohnette – star on George Adams’s Sound Suggestions from 1979.
Just months prior to Gnu High’s release, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette together with guitarist John Abercrombie released their trio debut recording as Gateway (also released as part of the Luminessence series).Both Holland and DeJohnette belong among the very first musicians to have recorded for ECM – Dave Holland’s earliest entries being A.R.C. alongside Chick Corea and Barry Altschul and Improvisations for Cello and Guitar with Derek Bailey, each released in 1971. Holland’s seminal Conference of the Birds was recorded merely a year later and released in 1973, two years before the arrival of Gnu High. His vast idiomatic reach, balancing between the realm of free jazz on the one hand and more lyrical statements on the other, was on confident display from the start.
DeJohnette – the most recorded drummer on the label – rekindled with Keith Jarrett for Gary Peacock’s 1977 trio recording Tales of Another – six years prior to the Standards, Vol. 1 recording, where the same trio reconvened but in a completely different guise, ushering in the “era” of the Keith Jarrett trio commonly referred to as “the standards trio”. Besides Jack DeJohnette’s albums with his Directions and Special Edition bands, the drummer (sometimes pianist) has appeared on countless recordings of other ECM stalwarts to this day, including records by Dave Holland, Jan Garbarek, Steve Kuhn, Pat Metheny, John Surman, Mick Goodrick, Bill Conners, Anouar Brahem and far too many more to list here.
Gnu High marks Keith Jarrett’s last contribution as a sideman on ECM. He was arguably at one of his many creative peaks when the album was recorded – several of his most influential recordings were made within a four-year-radius of Wheeler’s debut. Two years prior, Bremen-Lausanne was recorded and released (reissued as part of the Luminessence series in 2023), a major musical statement in his series of improvised-solo-concert rivalled – in the eyes of the press – only by few others, including The Köln Concert, released the same year as Gnu High. Belonging, the acclaimed debut of his so-called European quartet with Jan Garbarek, was released just a year before, his organ album Hymns Spheres, recorded at the Ottobeuren Abbey, a year later, in 1976. Not to forget Arbour Zena, the major orchestral piece performed alongside Jan Garbarek, Charlie Haden and members of the RSO Stuttgart, likewise recorded in 1975, released in 1976.
Gnu High is both a major statement in its own right and a puzzle piece in a larger picture – a historic context where major streams (and major artists) within ECM’s catalogue converge.