Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Colley, Brian Blade, Tokyo, ECM review

Perfect Saturday morning listen

The ghost of Paul Motian is important here on this studio recording made in a Tokyo studio last October. Austrian guitarist-composer Wolfgang Muthspiel has interpreted the Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett drummer’s ‘Abacus’ before on an excellent solo album issued by Clap Your Hands last year.

Wolfgang Muthspiel, Etudes / Quietudes, Clap Your Hands ****

And this is just as good. But that’s later on in the album which is begun by a version of ‘Lisbon Stomp,’ the Keith Jarrett debut Life Between the Exit Signs (Vortex, 1968) piece that Motian was also on in the 1960s. It is easy to say but it is true that double bassist Scott Colley is Charlie Haden-like throughout but especially on the beautiful Muthspiel original, ‘Pradela.’

An album piece, above in the video, punning on Kurt Weill’s name the Germany born composer whose ‘Liebeslied’ from The Threepenny Opera the Muthspiel trio interpreted on 2023’s Dance of the Elders.

Quite an introverted album it struck me. Maybe more so than their previous work together. Brian Blade remains as much a muse as Motian. It’s beyond time what he achieves when playing groove; finding ways to fill seems redundant because what he does is more about searching and then finding an essence to shape it to what he hears around. Raw materials become finished artefacts in the space of seconds and minutes in the studio released into the air. You gravitate to this great trio’s work for its capturing of contemplativeness, quiet rhapsodies and intricate flourishes.

Tokyo often feels acoustic even when the leader picks up electric guitar because of the turn down the lamp mastering levels and a sound that through the tossing and turning fitful sleep disturbed by the eerily quiet storm raging beyond nevertheless exudes a lot of passion. There is tension which is released not in an obvious fashion or by overblown dynamics but more by logic – in other words outcomes make sense as they emerge out of a sometimes forbidding harmonic tunnel.

I liked ‘Christa’s Dream’ most where Muthspiel’s choice of effects are quite Pat Metheny-like. The guitarist told jazzguitartoday.com referring to this piece: “On the main guitar, I use chorus and tremolo. On that overdubbed solo at the end, I programmed a sound with two octaves, one up, one down, plus tremolo and chorus, and played on the bridge pickup with the highs turned off.” That piece is more of an exception rather than a typical example of the abundance of what’s here. The dramatic and intricately constructed ‘Diminished and Augmented,’ another original and very different, is also stunning.