Colours

Eberhard Weber, Rainer Brüninghaus, Charlie Mariano, John Marshall, Jon Christensen

Box Set from the "Old & New Masters" Series.
 
This three CD box brings together music recorded for ECM by Eberhard Weber’s band Colours: the albums “Yellow Fields” (1975), “Silent Feet” (1977) and “Little Movements” (1980). Throughout the six years of its existence, Colours was one of the most popular ensembles on the European jazz touring circuit – although Weber has always stressed the group’s conceptual distance from a jazz mainstream. Many idiomatic elements were combined in Colours’ stylistic mix. The group’s sound-world consciously extended the palette proposed by “The Colours of Chloё”, Weber’s prize-winning ECM disc of 1974. As the innovative German bassist explains in the liner notes, “there were various aspects to the [Chloё] session, from the reflective European or chamber music side of the writing, to some jazz-rock and a kind of pictorial play with minimalism. Eventually, all these aspects would be developed in Colours.”
 
This box set, the latest in ECM’s acclaimed Old & Masters Edition, is rush-released in time for the presentation of the German Jazz Award/Albert Mangelsdorff Prize to Eberhard Weber in Berlin on November 6.
Featured Artists Recorded

1975-1980, Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg

Original Release Date

06.11.2009

  • CD 1
  • 1Touch
    (Eberhard Weber)
    04:59
  • 2Sand-Glass
    (Eberhard Weber)
    15:31
  • 3Yellow Fields
    (Eberhard Weber)
    10:04
  • 4Left Lane
    (Eberhard Weber)
    13:37
  • CD 2
  • 1Seriously Deep
    (Eberhard Weber)
    17:48
  • 2Silent Feet
    (Eberhard Weber)
    12:11
  • 3Eyes That Can See In The Dark
    (Eberhard Weber)
    12:20
  • CD 3
  • 1The Last Stage Of A Long Journey
    (Eberhard Weber)
    09:40
  • 2Bali
    (Rainer Brüninghaus)
    12:24
  • 3A Dark Spell
    (Eberhard Weber)
    08:22
  • 4Little Movements
    (Eberhard Weber)
    07:25
  • 5'No Trees?' He Said
    (Eberhard Weber)
    05:01
 
ECM has repackaged three of the band’s best albums from the decade of its emergence, and it’s remarkable how fresh it still sounds. Yellow Fields, an exploration of the layering of harmony that is nonetheless energised by engaging vamps and the keening reeds sounds of the late Charlie Mariano, remains the best of the bunch. But its 1977 successor Silent Feet and 1980’s Little Movements aren’t far behind. … Colours was a landmark band, and if some of this music sounds familiar, it’s because its impact was widespread.
John Fordham, The Guardian
 
Weber, with his customised upright electric contraption, was honing a new approach to the bass as a frontline instrument that would soon lead him to a long partnership with Norwegian saxist Jan Garbarek. It is easy to see why: these lucid, thickly flowing and moody sessions are the essence of runic North European jazz.
Garry Booth, BBC Music Magazine
 
At this distance what is astonishing is the wide range of music this band covered. The liner notes refer to the “distinctive European note” Colours evoked, which of course they do, but they also looked beyond European influences to embrace world influences with Mariano doubling on flutes, shenai and nagaswaram… Perhaps even more astonishing is how this sophisticated and forward-looking music to be found on so many tracks in this set still sounds ahead of its time today.
Stuart Nicholson, Jazzwise


This three CD box brings together music recorded for ECM by Eberhard Weber’s band Colours: the albums “Yellow Fields” (1975), “Silent Feet” (1977) and “Little Movements” (1980). Throughout the six years of its existence, Colours was one of the most popular ensembles on the European jazz touring circuit – although Weber has always stressed the group’s conceptual distance from a jazz mainstream. Many idiomatic elements were combined in Colours’ stylistic mix. The group’s sound-world consciously extended the palette proposed by “The Colours of Chloe”, Weber’s prize-winning ECM disc of 1974. As the German bassist explains to writer Michael Tucker in the liner notes, “there were various aspects to the [Chloe] session, from the reflective European or chamber music side of the writing, to some jazz-rock and a kind of pictorial play with minimalism. Eventually, all these aspects would be developed in Colours.”

And not only these: US saxophonist Charlie Mariano had followed his enthusiasm for Indian music to the source and brought the sounds of the nagaswaram and the shehnai into Colours, as well as some of the deeply soulful jazz playing he had demonstrated with Charles Mingus on the classic “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.” With gigs and recordings with Stan Kenton, McCoy Tyner and Toshiko Akiyoshi behind him and a reputation as a vital contributor to the new European scene of the post-free period, Mariano was a unique frontline player for Weber’s band. And the leader himself was, of course, one of Colours’ primary soloists and melody players. In the vanguard of the movement to liberate the bass from mere time keeping responsibilities, Weber stepped forward in the 1970s to define and delineate new territory for his customized electrobass. Before “Yellow Fields” (1975) no one else sounded like this – though plenty of electric bassists would try – and Jaco Pastorius’s debut album was still a year away.

In the first version of Colours, Norway’s Jon Christensen was on hand to develop further ideas that he and Weber had first explored in Ralph Towner’s “Solstice” project: “We had something special in the rhythm, a kind of organic multi-layering and contrasts in the accents. So you had a crispness and also a slower, more spacious, offset quality. I used to talk about playing waves, playing across bar divisions. And Eberhard felt it right away.”

When Christensen left Colours in 1977, his place was taken by English drummer John Marshall, a player thoroughly at home in the space between jazz and progressive rock, as his years with the Soft Machine had proven.

Completing the line-up: keyboardist Rainer Brüninghaus, valued by Weber as a jazz musician steeped in European music, and an important collaborator from “The Colours of Chloe” onward. Brüninghaus would eventually follow Weber into the Jan Garbarek Group – the keyboardist remains there to this day (see the recent “Dresden”).

The Colours box is released a few weeks before Eberhard Weber’s 70th birthday in January 2010, and in time for the presentation of the Albert Mangelsdorff Preis – Germany’s biggest jazz award – to Weber for his life’s work. The award ceremony is on November 6 in Berlin, where the laudatio will be given by Manfred Schoof.