New releases from ECM: It’s a parade of legendary names: Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Arild Andersen, Jason Moran, Thomas Morgan, Craig Taborn … Videos, Photos

Three new ECM albums have just been released on CD. Taking Turns, recorded at New York’s Avatar Studio a decade ago.

Lee Konitz, Andrew Cyrille, Bill Frisell, Jason Moran and Thomas Morgan lend their energies to a session that sidesteps the conventions of the “all-star” band and emphasizes teamwork.

Bro’s spatially aware music encourages new responses: an atmospheric hint or a sliver of delicate melody, opening up new paths to explore. “My compositions are about glimpsing a feeling, sketching it out and then unfolding it as we record,” Jakob Bro said at the time.

Musical messages from Oslo, New York, Basel and Lugano, recorded between 2018 and 2022, are juxtaposed and recombined in a compelling recording featuring Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen as a soloist and in a series of duets.

With partners Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, Sinikka Langeland and Jorge Rossy, the musical frame of reference is very broad.

Elements ranging from Langeland’s archaic folk to Potter’s post-Coltrane saxophone and Taborn’s swirling modernist piano each find their place in a project that implies new threads of connectivity, new creative relationships.

The album was completed and mixed by Strønen and producer Manfred Eicher at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich in February 2023.

Arild Andersen, one of the most acclaimed jazz bassists, presents his first solo album. Characteristically broad in its musical scope and creative range, Landloper was recorded primarily at the Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo (with one piece recorded at Arild’s home).

The choice of repertoire in this recital reflects Arild’s artistic journey, and alongside Andersen originals (“Dreamhorse”, “Mira”, “Landloper”) we find traditional Norwegian music (“Old Stev”), a romantic jazz standard (“A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square”) and a new light cast on free jazz classics (Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts”, Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”, Charlie Haden’s “Song for Che”).

Andersen’s performances combine his masterful bass playing with the real-time creation of electronic loops that bring an atmospheric dimension to the solo performance and new opportunities for interaction.

At first glance, these are three remarkable albums, although it remains difficult to understand the reasons that kept Jakob Bro’s album in a drawer for ten years, certainly the most engaging of the trio for quantity of talents. But the other two albums also stand out significantly from a general qualitative average thanks to an original path, the result of creative collaborations or a solitary path in the name of class and lyricism.

ECM has always divided fans, the particular “sound” that has always characterized the albums produced by Eicher does not receive univocal consensus, but in these three albums the quality and creativity of the protagonists overshadows the divergences in sound and production.

Absolutely worth listening to.