17.12.2024 | Timeline

Year in a review (part III)

As the year is approaching its conclusion, we continue to take a look back at the many albums released on ECM throughout 2024. The third instalment of the year’s roundup includes recordings released between the summer and early autumn.

Released head to head in early July were two idiomatically disparate albums by duos who each saw the coming together of an old master with a younger but equally innovative counterpart: Norma Winstone and Kit Downs with Outpost of Dreams on the one hand and Barry Guy and Jordina Milla with Live in Munich on the other.

Each received rave-reactions – the Guardian’s John Fordham said the following about the former: “Winstone has latterly refined her tone to a steadily luminous delicacy in the upper register and a dark glow deep down, and Downes empathically coaxes her thoughts, segued into his own improv variations in the wide spaces she instinctively leaves”. Jazzwise’s Kevin LeGendre called Live in Munich an “emphatically original, uncompromisingly provocative work from an outstanding duo.”

Late July also saw the release of Giovanni Guidi’s A New Day, his exciting quartet collaboration with saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. In his the blue moment blog, Richard Williams called it an “excellent new album,” on which “Lewis fits his playing beautifully into the group’s habitual matrix, adding an extra dimension of careful lyricism”.

The second ECM duo album of Mat Maneri and Lucian Ban Transylvanian Dance arrived in late August and sees the American violist and Romanian pianist finding fresh inspiration as they follow the trail of Béla Bartók, revisiting the folk music that spurred the imagination of the great Hungarian composer. “Ban and Maneri once again bring this folk music to life in a way that touches the heart. They also set a monument to Bartók. And not least to themselves,” noted Peter Rüedi in the Suisse daily paper Die Weltwoche.

A quartet of albums saw the light of day in September, presenting a juxtaposition of two very different duos, free threeway interaction on the basis of folk idioms and the embrace of a large brass section around a piano, making up a quadrumvirate of recordings that each defy categorization in their own way.

In a five-star review, UK Vibe eulogized over Florian Weber’s Imaginary Cycle: “The enigmatic nature of what we hear on this recording makes it a must-have for anyone open to the beauty of music, whether that be from a classical or a jazz view-point. ‘Imaginary Cycle’ is an album to discover, an album to immerse oneself in, its incredible writing, improvisation, heart-felt and intuitive performances, all adding to its very special ‘one-of-a-kind’ sonic atmosphere and superior sound quality. A triumph of modern-day music-making.”

Za Górami, Presto’s Jazz Recording Of The Year 2024, presents Fred Thomas in trio with vocalist and violinist Alice Zawadzki and bassist Misha Abbado. The album summed up “the intimate beauty expansive mystery of this exquisite trio,” according to Downbeat, while The Guardian selected it as its “Album Of The Month”, with “beautiful music and absorbing stories. Za Górami is mostly a slow-moving programme of beautifully conveyed wistful songs, but only exploratory and jazz-immersed musicians could have delivered them this way.”

Louis Sclavis and Benjamin Moussay’s first duo recording Unfolding captured the intimately familiar players with a haunting programme of originals in a dynamic chamber music setting. An album ”as evident as it is necessary” according to Jazz Magazine. Télérama: “We hear two performers, two instruments, but the overriding impression is that of a single voice, like a science-fiction unison. A singular symbiosis that reinforces the overall inspiration.”

Finally, the long awaited follow-up to Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli’s Yeraz (2008) completed the group of four. And the rapport between the saxophonist and the accordionist has grown even more fluid in the meantime, as Our Time proves. As written in Libération, the saxophonist and accordionist “let their fingers and their ideas run wild in their fruitful improvisations, which never lose the fragile thread of a melody but always trace a sound poetry beyond the contingencies of current events.”