JOE LOVANO / MARILYN CRISPELL / CARMEN CASTALDI - Trio Tapestry (2019) FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Though most often associated with his swinging post-bop albums for Blue Note, saxophonist Joe Lovano is no stranger to the ECM label. He first recorded with producer Manfred Eicher's storied German institution in 1981 for drummer Paul Motian's album Psalm, playing alongside bassist Ed Schuller and guitarist Bill Frisell. Since then he has made several appearances on the label, including further hits with Motian (who died in 2011), as well as pianist Steve Kuhn and guitarist John Abercrombie. With 2019's deeply atmospheric Trio Tapestry, Lovano takes his relationship with ECM to the next logical and long-awaited plateau: by leading his first session for the label. Joining him are longtime associates in pianist Marilyn Crispell and fellow Cleveland native/drummer Carmen Castaldi. Lovano first played with Crispell in 2006 in a group that included Motian. He's known Castaldi since he was a teenager, and also as a student at Boston's Berklee School of Music, where they both studied. Having started her career in the '70s playing free jazz, Crispell has evolved into a deeply nuanced and harmonically engaging performer whose style often works as a bridge between the avant-garde and more accessible playing. This in-between bridge is what Lovano's trio explores on a set of original compositions that work more as impressionistic sound explorations than traditional, standards-based improvisations. Silence plays a huge role in the trio's sound. "One Time In" opens with a skittering clang of cymbals and a gong, and then there's nothing until Lovano's mournful, bird-like saxophone breaks through the metallic glow. Similarly, "Sparkle Lights" begins as a piano/sax duo with Lovano and Crispell playing a hushed, diminished-sounding phrase that gives way to emptiness before the trio delicately push back against the silence with icy harmonic swells. Elsewhere, they take a more tangible approach, offering up the melancholy balladry of "Seeds of Change," and growl through the atonal Ornette Coleman-ism of "The Smiling Dog." Primarily however, tracks like the evocative "Mystic" (which sounds like it was recorded in a large church, or empty gorge), and the aptly titled "Gong Episode," remain enigmatic, as if Lovano and his bandmates are less interested in a playing music, than in playing the space around them. by Matt Collar 
Tracklist:
1 One Time In 3:41
Joe Lovano
2 Seeds of Change 5:13
Joe Lovano
3 Razzle Dazzle 3:40
Joe Lovano
4 Sparkle Lights 4:07
Joe Lovano
5 Mystic 8:25
Joe Lovano
6 Piano/Drum Episode 3:40
Joe Lovano
7 Gong Episode 2:01
Joe Lovano
8 Rare Beauty 6:18
Joe Lovano
9 Spirit Lake 3:49
Joe Lovano
10 Tarrassa 4:15
Joe Lovano
11 The Smilling Dog 2:55
Joe Lovano
Credits:
Drums, Percussion – Carmen Castaldi
Piano – Marilyn Crispell
Producer [Produced By] – Manfred Eicher
Tenor Saxophone, Tárogató [Tarogato], Gong [Gongs] – Joe Lovano

DEREK BAILEY / JOËLLE LÉANDRE - No Waiting (1997) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Derek Bailey has recorded many LPs and CDs, yet his style never fails to invigorate. This one is no exception. These five totally improvised duos between Bailey and string bassist Joëlle Leandre, live in concert at Les Instants Chavirés in Montreuil, France, are some of the most interesting examples of the free music genre. Bailey's electric guitar reverberates ever so spasmodically next to Leandre's scratchy, then hyper-technical bass. Leandre can play with such virtuosity and intensity, but Bailey can counter with space and atmospherics before concentrating on little sounds. Call it a symphony of tiny, sometimes busy, sounds, and you get the idea. The entire album is a lesson in interaction: Leandre and Bailey duel, but only peripherally; they blend not as one, but as a two-headed dragon. In all, a cause for celebration. by Steve Loewy

HANS REICHEL - Lower Lurum (1994) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Hans Reichel's Lower Lurum is perhaps the record that introduced the world to his invention, the daxophone, a box playing a long, thin altered board that produces so many tones and sounds they are virtually limitless. Add to this Reichel's homemade guitars, which are truly exotic pieces of art as well as functional instruments, and you have an orchestra from another dimension. Which is what Lower Lurum is pretty much all about. Being subtitled as a "guitar and daxophone" operetta, in Reichel's mind there is probably a concept here. But that concept for the listener -- especially since there are no notes explaining what the "plot" of this operetta is supposed to be -- is tonal. Given how technical Reichel is about everything in the booklet, it is -- for those who've never heard Reichel's music -- shocking to hear its emotional warmth, depth, and humor. There is very little manipulation of sound with overdubs occurring in very few places, and even they are used sparingly. This is music that comes straight through the microphone without effects. In large part this is because it doesn't need any. Reichel's operetta and his music in general are more musical than music because they integrate the entire human being -- physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual -- into the way in which a composition or improvisation is executed and ultimately sounds. On Lower Lurum, Reichel has created a light body (or, from the Buddhist perspective, a rainbow body) of sound. Its clarity and spirit are one in the same, expressed as resonances from the heart through the hands and moving beyond them both into a sonic architecture that expresses emotions and thoughts that occur just beyond the field of language, and that achievement is far greater that the faculty of language this reviewer possesses. by Thom Jurek  

KEITH JARRETT - The Köln Concert (1975) FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Recorded in 1975 at the Köln Opera House and released the same year, this disc has, along with its revelatory music, some attendant cultural baggage that is unfair in one sense: Every pot-smoking and dazed and confused college kid -- and a few of the more sophisticated ones in high school -- owned this as one of the truly classic jazz records, along with Bitches Brew, Kind of Blue, Take Five, A Love Supreme, and something by Grover Washington, Jr. Such is cultural miscegenation. It also gets unfairly blamed for creating George Winston, but that's another story. What Keith Jarrett had begun a year before on the Solo Concerts album and brought to such gorgeous flowering here was nothing short of a miracle. With all the tedium surrounding jazz-rock fusion, the complete absence on these shores of neo-trad anything, and the hopelessly angry gyrations of the avant-garde, Jarrett brought quiet and lyricism to revolutionary improvisation. Nothing on this program was considered before he sat down to play. All of the gestures, intricate droning harmonies, skittering and shimmering melodic lines, and whoops and sighs from the man are spontaneous. Although it was one continuous concert, the piece is divided into four sections, largely because it had to be divided for double LP. But from the moment Jarrett blushes his opening chords and begins meditating on harmonic invention, melodic figure construction, glissando combinations, and occasional ostinato phrasing, music changed. For some listeners it changed forever in that moment. For others it was a momentary flush of excitement, but it was change, something so sorely needed and begged for by the record-buying public. Jarrett's intimate meditation on the inner workings of not only his pianism, but also the instrument itself and the nature of sound and how it stacks up against silence, involved listeners in its search for beauty, truth, and meaning. The concert swings with liberation from cynicism or the need to prove anything to anyone ever again. With this album, Jarrett put himself in his own league, and you can feel the inspiration coming off him in waves. This may have been the album every stoner wanted in his collection "because the chicks dug it." Yet it speaks volumes about a musician and a music that opened up the world of jazz to so many who had been excluded, and offered the possibility -- if only briefly -- of a cultural, aesthetic optimism, no matter how brief that interval actually was. This is a true and lasting masterpiece of melodic, spontaneous composition and improvisation that set the standard. by Thom Jurek
Tracklist:
1 Part I   26:01
2 Part II A   14:54
3 Part II B   18:13
4 Part II C   6:59