New from From ECM
ECM might just be the finest recording company in the world.
White
Marc Sinan, Oğuz Büyükberber
Release date: 18.05.2018
ECM 2558
Marc Sinan’s third ECM release is an evocative duo album with Oğuz Büyükberber which subtly covers a lot of ground. The guitarist and the clarinettist have worked together in many contexts since first meeting in Istanbul a decade ago, and Büyükberber previously appeared on Hasretim: Journey to Anatolia, released in 2013, as well as in Sinan’s music-theatre piece Komitas. The individual musical directions of the two players have effectively converged from opposite poles: Marc was trained as a classical guitarist in the western European tradition, but has increasingly been drawn to improvisation and Turkish material, while Oğuz started out with Turkish music and jazz before exploring free improvisation and contemporary composition. For White, both musicians provide new music. Sinan’s five-part Upon Nothingness incorporates his musical response to recordings of songs of Armenian prisoners deported to Germany during the First World War. These historic field recordings are woven into the fabric of Sinan’s pieces, which also make liberal use of electronics, blurring the distinction between the real and the surreal. Oğuz Büyükberber also contributes a series of linked pieces, There, I-V, in which both musicians improvise around predetermined pitch sets. White was recorded in Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in October 2016 and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Featured artists
Marc Sinan Guitar
Oğuz Büyükberber Clarinet
A Suite Of Poems
Ketil Bjørnstad
Release date: 18.05.2018
ECM 2440
Norwegian-Danish author Lars Saabye Christensen is one of Scandinavia most widely-praised and prolific contemporary writers. For many years now, in the course of his travels around the globe, he has been sending “hotel poems” to his friend Ketil Bjørnstad, inviting him to make music out of them. These literary postcards explore a range of moods. Bjørnstad says: “I feel very connected to the lonely, existential perspective of these poems, made in different hotel rooms.” For this recording, Ketil worked closely with singer and actress Anneli Drecker, former lead vocalist of pop group Bel Canto. Settings of poetry form a special category in Norwegian pianist-composer Bjørnstad’s discography and A Suite of Poems is a song cycle to put alongside such projects as A Passion for John Donne, Sunrise, and The Light.
Settings of poetry and other literary texts form a special category in the discography of Norwegian pianist-composer Ketil Bjørnstad and A Suite of Poems, recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in June 2016, is a song cycle to put alongside such projects as A Passion for John Donne, Sunrise, and The Light.
Norwegian-Danish author Lars Saabye Christensen is one of Scandinavia’s most widely-praised contemporary writers. A prolific author, he published his first book, the poetry collection Historien om Gly in 1976, and won Norway’s Tarjei Vesaas’ debutantpris for best newcomer, to be followed in due course by many more literary awards. He has since written more than 40 books, novels and poetry primarily, as well as film scripts.
Lars Saabye Christensen and Ketil Bjørnstad – both born in Oslo (Christensen in 1953, Bjørnstad a year earlier) have known each other since they were teenagers. For many years now, in the course of his travels around the globe, Christensen has been sending “hotel poems” to his friend Ketil Bjørnstad, inviting him to make music out of them. “I started writing music to his poems more than 20 years ago,” writes Ketil in his liner note for A Suite of Poems. “His ability to expose the inner conflicts we all bring with us in our suitcases is striking.”
Christensen’s literary postcards explore a range of moods. Bjørnstad: “I feel very connected to the lonely, existential perspective of these poems, made in different hotel rooms.” For this recording, Ketil worked closely with singer and actress Anneli Drecker, vocalist of pop group Bel Canto. Ketil and Anneli are also friends of long-standing. Drecker had sung on Bjørnstad’s Grace album, with settings of John Donne, back in 2000, and toured with him. She too had taken to sending Ketil “poetic, sad, or funny” messages from far flung hotels when she was out touring the world with A-ha or Royskopp.
“So what is the hidden secret of travelling, and living such a big part of our lives in hotel rooms?”, asks Ketil Bjørnstad. “In a certain sense, we are three of a kind, making this album together.”
Ketil Bjørnstad, described by The Guardian as “a cultural prodigy”, trained initially as a classical pianist, transferring his allegiances to jazz after hearing Miles Davis and Terje Rypdal. Bjørnstad made his first recording, with a quartet that included Jon Christensen and Arild Andersen, in 1973. Another 20 years would pass before he came to ECM, with Water Stories, a collaboration with Rypdal and Christensen. Bjørnstad is also a bestselling and widely translated novelist, and although the composer long kept his two creative currents apart, in recent years there has been much more overt cross-fertilisation. A Passion for John Donne, released in 2014, is inspired by the great English Metaphysical poet who has fascinated the composer for decades. A previous song cycle of Donne settings featured on the album, The Light. The double CD Vinding’s Music takes the listener into the heart of Bjørnstad’s literary world, and is a sort of “literary soundtrack” to his trilogy of novels about a young Norwegian pianist, Aksel Vinding.
Anneli Drecker, born in 1969 in Tromsø first came to international attention in the 1980s as vocalist with Bel Canto, whose synthesizer driven pop music and ‘Arctic electronica’ dreamscapes proved highly influential in the period, and led to collaborations with musicians including Jah Wobble and Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, as well as many experimentally-inclined Norwegian players. In parallel, Drecker has had a successful career as an actor in Norway, appearing in numerous theatre productions, as well as films and TV, and also made several solo albums. Anneli Drecker has also set poetry to music, including verse of Arvid Handsen.
CD booklet includes texts of all poems and an introductory note by Ketil Bjørnstad
Featured artists
Ketil Bjørnstad Piano
Anneli Drecker Voice
Life Of
Steve Tibbetts
Release date: 18.05.2018
ECM 2599
One-of-a-kind guitarist and record-maker Steve Tibbetts has an association with ECM dating back to 1981, with his body of work reflecting that of an artist who follows his own winding, questing path. The BBC has described his music as “an atmospheric brew… brilliant, individual.” Life Of…, his ninth album for the label, serves as something of a sequel to his 2010 ECM release, Natural Causes, which Jazz Times called “music to get lost in.” Like the earlier album, Life Of… showcases the richness of his Martin 12-string acoustic guitar, along with his gamelan-like piano and artfully deployed field samples of Balinese gongs; the sonic picture also incorporates the sensitive percussion of long-time musical partner Marc Anderson and the almost subliminal cello drones of Michelle Kinney. Tibbetts, though rooted in the American Midwest, has made multiple expeditions to Southeast Asia, including Bali and Nepal; not only the sounds but the spirits of those places are woven into his musical DNA as much as the expressive inspiration of artists from guitarist Bill Connors to sarangi master Sultan Khan. Life Of… has a contemplative shimmer like a reflecting pool, with most of the album’s pieces titled after friends and family, living and past.
After the long break following Tibbetts’ 1994 ECM release The Fall of Us All – a period that saw him collaborate with the likes of Norwegian Hardanger fiddle player Knut Hamre and Tibetan Buddhist nun Chöying Drolma – the guitarist has returned to a consistent production schedule for the label in the 21st century. He has released an album via ECM every eight years, with Life Of preceded by the similarly acoustic-oriented Natural Causes (2010) and the fiery, electric A Man About a Horse (2002). These impressionistic, densely layered creations led Jazziz magazine to note about the guitarist-producer’s style of evocative abstraction: “He seems more interested in radiant sound paintings than… linear structures. The forest is more intriguing to him than the trees.”
Tibbetts says the difference between making Natural Causes and Life Of is that he’s “a better piano player now,” adding: “I labor over these records to perhaps an insane degree, but that’s not about achieving any kind of instrumental perfection. So many things in our culture are over-produced now, sanded down to a kind of flawless metallic gleam. I’ve gone more organic as the years have gone on. I want the records to have a human, handcrafted quality.”
As with Natural Causes, Tibbetts mixed the record in the concert hall of Macalester College, near where he lives in Minnesota. “I take all my gear down to the hall and play the tracks back in the room’s acoustic, capturing the room tone and mixing it that way. I set up two pairs of mics: one pair in the center of the hall, one pair in the back. It allows the hall’s ambience to settle around the piano and percussion, and the room’s natural acoustics help the guitar settle into the piano. It’s a more labor-intensive process, and the effect is perhaps subtle to most ears. But it feels more organic to me, adding some reality to the sound. I suppose it’s like a bay leaf in a soup – it has an intangible effect that adds to the experience.”
The album’s key tone generator is Tibbetts’ 12-string guitar, the Martin D-12-20 he got from his father in the late ’70s. He has long incorporated into his playing string bends and vibrato inspired by jazz guitarist Bill Connors and blues-rocker Harvey Mandel, as well as the vocal ideal that Sultan Khan achieved with his bowed sarangi. “That Martin guitar is now, almost a half-century old, with the frets almost worn flat – and I keep the strings old and kind of dead, something I got from Leo Kottke,” he explains. “So, the instrument has a mellow, aged sound, with its own peculiar internal resonance – like it has a small concert hall inside it. I try to bring out that quality by stringing the guitar in double courses, the four lower strings paired in unisons rather than octaves. You really have to physically engage with the strings of this guitar, while also being careful that your touch doesn’t de-tune the strings. But setting it up that way makes it so I can play with the resonant qualities of the wood, drawing out overtones and getting the single string lines to ‘sing’ – which is what I loved about the sound of Sultan Khan, the way he could fill the room like a voice.”
Tibbetts plays the piano as kind of virtual gamelan, using the keyboard like a row of gongs and letting it cycle through the structure of a piece. The layers of his guitar and piano interact with the actual gongs and other metallophones Tibbetts sampled in Bali and that he triggers via another 12-string guitar equipped with a MIDI interface. Such tracks as Life of Mir also include the subtly placed cello lines of Kinney (who also appeared on Tibbetts’ 1989 ECM disc, Big Map Idea). Then there is the ever-sympathetic percussion of Anderson, who has played on all of Tibbetts’ ECM albums. “Working with Marc is like working with my own hands,” the guitarist says. “I don’t have to tell my hands to find the fretboard – they just do. It’s the same with Marc, after 40 years. I don’t have to ask him to do anything in particular. On his own, he always finds the right drum, the right approach.”
About the sound and sensibility of his two most recent albums, Tibbetts says: “I suppose nostalgia inevitably creeps into life at middle age, so it’s fitting that these two records are more about quiet, acoustic reflection and less about shredding on electric guitar, as with A Man About a Horse and The Fall of Us All.” The titles for 10 of the songs on Life Of refer to loved ones or even a person Tibbetts might have observed closely over time while at work in a local coffee shop – Life of Emily, Life of Joel, Life of Someone and so on. This lends abstract music a personal element, even if the titles came independently of the musical inspiration. This is especially so in the scene-setting opener Bloodwork, the title of which relates to Tibbetts going through an intense medical procedure to help his sick sister. He says: “It’s simultaneously a very personal word and a very clinical word, which I suppose echoes the experience.”
As for the long, if consistent, gaps between albums, Tibbetts concludes: “I’m not churning out a tremendous amount of music, it’s true. But I think my listeners trust me. When I take the time to put something together over a long period and am finally satisfied with it, I think they will be, too.”
Featured artists
Steve Tibbetts Guitar, Piano
Marc Anderson Percussion, Handpan
Michelle Kinney Cello, Drones
Videos
Discover our new releases on the ECM YouTube channel
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
Stem Education Coalition
John Schaefer
For new music by living composers
newsounds.org from New York Public Radio
https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM
http://www.thegreenespace.org/
For great Jazz
88.3FM http://wbgo.org/
WPRB 103.3FM
Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm
Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio
Like this:
Like Loading...
Reply