The third album from Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry finds the group continuing to extend its spacious and lyrical approach, with deep listening and intense focus. “Our Daily Bread is fueled by the rhythm spirit of expression that projects the mysterious world of music that lies ahead,” says master saxophonist Lovano in his liner note and these elegantly fluid pieces and free-floating ballads indeed feel like songs of the soul. “The intensity comes not from ferocity but from depth of feeling,” wrote the BBC Music Magazine of the group’s debut. “ Lovano’s themes and harmonies provide rich potential which the trio realises beautifully, exploring texture and mood as fruitfully as it develops melody and harmony.”

A duet performance between pianist Marilyn Crispell and clarinetist David Rothenberg offers nebulous mystery and thematic, ECM-style theatrical contexts you should expect from longtime veterans of creative improvised music. The liquid piano sound of Crispell and the pithy, earthy, throat tones of Rothenberg's bass clarinet in the main shapeshift back and forth during this mercurial program of deep blue, darkest night, after-hours modern jazz.

Two pianos sounding in tandem can feel – given that the instrument belongs to the percussion family – like a kind of 176-key gamelan, an atmospheric orchestra ringing and resonating and radiating in unity. In that way, the music of How to Turn the Moon by pianists Angelica Sanchez and Marilyn Crispell vibrates with a special, luminous quality. In composing all the pieces for this album, Angelica was inspired by Marilyn’s ever-questing sound and sensibility, as well as the uncommon rapport they share as players and as people.

The debut album of Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry was one of 2019’s most talked-about releases. The trio’s musical concept – the Boston Globe spoke of “utterances of hushed assurance, lyricism and suspense” - is taken to the next level on its second album, Garden of Expression, a recording distinguished by its intense focus. Lovano, a saxophonist whose reach extends across the history of modern jazz and beyond, plays with exceptional sensitivity in Trio Tapestry. And the music he writes for this group - tenderly melodic or declamatory, harmonically open, rhythmically free, and spiritually involving - encourages subtle and differentiated responses from his creative partners. Joe describes their interaction as “magical”. Carmen Castaldi’s space-conscious approach to drumming further refines an improvisational understanding that he and Lovano have shared since the 1970s.

Vignettes marks Crispell's solo piano debut with the label and, after listening through a couple of times, one wonders what took her so long. The pianist on this recording barely resembles the fiery player and improviser who accompanied Anthony Braxton for many years, or the musician who led her own intense ensembles or played hourlong improvised solos that had their roots in the physical approaches of Cecil Taylor and McCoy Tyner.
That said, Vignettes reflects another path of the simply startling development and change in Crispell's recent approach. Crispell has spent a great deal of time in Scandinavia listening to other artists who also record for ECM and other labels…

Seven years after the unprecedented ECM debut, Nothing Ever Was, Anyway, and three years after the stellar Amaryllis, pianist Marilyn Crispell gives listeners another trip down her ever deepening cavern of mystery and imagination. Teamed once again with drummer and composer Paul Motian and new bassist Mark Helias, Crispell builds an even sturdier tension bridge between her increasing focus on harmonic and melodic interplay and dynamic intensity. The polarities are the immediate way into this set, which is so full of ambiguities and spectral presences one could say it is haunted. Crispell's physicality is held in check for most of the proceedings here, but it is ever present…