New Jazz Releases

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Joseph

You might be intersted in the new Trio Tapestry disc calle "Our daily bread" which feaures Joe Lovano, Marilyn Crispell and Carmen Castaldi. It has been a while since I have bought any jazz discs but the title track really appealed to me when I head it on the radio. This music is pretty meditative as you would expect from ECM but it strikes me as an interesting take on post-Coltrane jazz and perhaps is refracted through the lens of Paul Motian's trio. It fascinates me because I could have seen Coltrane signing up to the nascent ECM label had he lived and the mixture of free jazz / world music would have been a direction I would not have been surprised to have seen him take.

Still working my way through this disc and I will give you my impressions later,

They recently played it in full on France Musique. (French radio). To me it sounded meandering and at times, empty doodling. It all seems so tired, with piano lines you can anticipate perfectly. I just wondered who would still buy this stuff? No idea what Coltrane would have been doing but surely something more energised than this. Other milages are possible, as they say

[Ian Thumwood]

They recently played it in full on France Musique. (French radio). To me it sounded meandering and at times, empty doodling. It all seems so tired, with piano lines you can anticipate perfectly. I just wondered who would still buy this stuff? No idea what Coltrane would have been doing but surely something more energised than this. Other milages are possible, as they say

I have had two listens now and I think that there is plenty other material out there where Lovano has been much better. The title track is exceptional but the remainder of the material is hit and miss. The reviews on line have been very positive but I have been a little disappointed by the record as a whole. What I think has not been picked up is the production which almost becomes a fourth member of the group. The reverb is unnatural.

Back in the day, I loved ECM yet I find the whole philosphy these days to have worn totally thin. The "less is more " approach is fine as is the tendency towards introspection but if the music is not really "happening", it does strike me as pointless. It is intriguing to here how some artists pursue a similar path but invariably do it with greater success than ECM. ECM is ultimately style over substance these days with much of the music effectively being a veneer offered by their production values applied to some really average recording sessions. I usually love Joe Lovano's playing but this is probably not as edgy as it thinks it is. I always think of ECM being rather like Everton football club where whenever a "star" signing is acquired, they are never able to reach the levels they had achieved elsewhere. Much of the ECM output has been pretty bland for the best part of 25 years and the best works on the lable strike me as being a long way back in the past. I feel it helped back in the 70s and 80s when this approach was original and the music certainly defined the more creative approach of that era which, after all, covered a good deal of the avant garde in Europe which followed in the wake of Coltrane. The problem now is that the music released by many of their artists now seems pretty tame in comparison. When I first got in to ECM in the 1980s, they seemed to be more of a challenge to listen to and not ahead of their time. Nowadays, they come across a timid and conservative.

As you say, it is intriguing to think what the market for this jazz is these days. It is certainly no longer at the vanguard of jazz and much of the music it now releases is almost a parody of itself. I would gave expected better from Lovano. This is the third ECM disc I have bought in nearly five years. Curious to compare it with the recent Andrew Cryille disc which is better albeit I would suggest you can find more interesting recordings by this drummer elsewhere. The Lovano effort is worth the effort for the title track . Not sure that I would exhange this record for his work with Frisell and Motian though.