“I was there when this music was written. In fact my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. Before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe.
This recording rose out of a spontaneous community - my dear friends the players and our engineer, the piano tuner, the guy who brought us sandwiches, the harried clerk who checked me into my hotel room on 48th street… The cast grew to contain multitudes. Music is pervasive, and I’m not surprised that Winter Songs has found its way to you.
– Steve Swallow
For Winter Songs, Steve Swallow’s first true leader date in over a decade (Into The Woodworks, 2013) and his first recorded appearance on the label after John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, the master-bassist has gathered together a group of close confidants to accompany him through some of the most intrinsic and melodically immediate music he has ever written. With the expert but subtly applied horn section of Chris Cheek on sax and Mike Rodriguez on trumpet, Adam Nussbaum on drums keeping the time flexible and the tasteful harmonic outlining of guitarist Steve Cardenas and Gil Goldstein on piano, the nine collected originals that make up Winter Songs act more as conveyors of patient reflection and calm than they do as inciters of turbulent improvisation.
Swallow’s own observations of the music and its inception (found above) are perceptible in sound: this music is not performed as a means to an end, but has become an end in itself. Fluid swing, thoughtful balladry and a chamber-music-like feel for space and interplay are in full bloom here and pull through the suite of nine untitled winter songs with a strong sense of direction.
The album was recorded at Sear Sound studio, New York in September 2024.
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A tradition-conscious modernist from the outset, by 1960 Steve Swallow, barely 20 years old, was playing alongside Paul Bley in the Jimmy Giuffre 3, whose quietly radical, freely contrapuntal music was to exert a powerful influence on subsequent generations of players. As Bley recounted it in his autobiography: “Jimmy had been so avant-garde so early that he was used to the idea that nobody was going to be on his wavelength...Then Steve came over and blew Giuffre’s mind by doing exactly what he was hoping a bassist would do.” The trio’s groundbreaking recordings Fusion and Thesis, made originally for Verve, were remixed by Manfred Eicher in 1992 and reissued on ECM as the double album 1961 – becoming thereby the earliest jazz recordings in the label’s catalogue.
While with Gary Burton in the late 60s, Swallow made the transition from double bass to bass guitar. Hotel Hello, a 1974 ECM duo recording with Gary Burton, featured Swallow compositions almost exclusively, pieces written while the bassist was living in the North California community of Bolinas. With Carla Bley, Swallow played in multiple formats from duo to Very Big Band over the decades. Steve’s succinct summary of their symbiotic musical relationship: “Carla’s a writer who also plays. I’m a player who also writes.”
Swallow joined Carla Bley’s band in 1978 in time for Musique Mécanique and was an integral part of all her groups thereafter. Carla wrote the music of Night-Glo to showcase Swallow’s bass playing; Swallow responded with Carla, a kind of musical love letter, and accompanied her on outlandish projects from Fancy Chamber Music and I Hate To Sing to Carla’s Christmas Carols. Carla Bley’s last recordings were a sequence of ECM albums with Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard: Trios, Andando el Tiempo and Life Goes On, which won the Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik 2020.
Into The Woodwork, recorded in 2011, aimed for a more varied textural palette as Swallow wrote music for a new line-up with Chris Cheek on saxophone and Steve Cardenas on guitar, musicians he had worked with in Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band. They were joined by Carla Bley on organ and Jorge Rossy on drums, the unpredictable “wild cards” in the new soundscape, keeping the mood playful. “Good humour before and after the red light goes on is very important”, Swallow observed at the time.
Many of Steve Swallow’s musical relationships have been long term affairs. The association with Carla Bley extended over a period of more than sixty years in total, beginning with the playing of her music in the Giuffre 3. That trio - with Jimmy Giuffre and Paul Bley - had a second act in the 1990s, reuniting and touring through Europe. And Swallow was a member of the Gary Burton Quartet for more than 20 years, and appeared on many of its recordings including the ECM albums Seven Songs for Quartet and Chamber Orchestra, Ring, Dreams So Real, Passengers, Times Square, Easy As Pie, Picture This, Real Life Hits and Whiz Kids.
Steve Swallow and John Scofield have been friends and musical associates since 1975, when Swallow was teaching at the Berklee School. For a while they collaborated in the Gary Burton group. When John launched his own career as a leader, Steve joined the guitarist’s trio, and their musical rapport, documented on many recordings along the way, is legendary. As Scofield says, “Sometimes when we play it’s like one big guitar, the bass part and my part together.” This was evident on Swallow Tales, an album full of Steve’s tunes, recorded by Scofield, Swallow and drummer Bill Stewart one afternoon in New York in 2019. “The musical synergy is thrilling,” said the BBC Music Magazine.
