ECM 2102|
John Abercrombie (g), Mark Feldman (vln), Thomas Morgan (b) and Joey Baron (d). Rec. December 2008

The guitarist’s fourth album with this quartet, and can it really be his twenty-sixth, for ECM? The only difference in the line up this time being the fast maturing young Dave Binney/Steve Coleman bassist Thomas Morgan standing in for Abercrombie’s long-time bass partner Marc Johnson, who was on the previous three. Yet the album contains a similarly liberated dialogue of ideas filtered through the kind of standard-like themes, contemporary post-bop, abstract freeform and ECM-stamped chamber jazz that marked the guitarist’s previous quartet albums. Virtuoso violinist Mark Feldman at times sounds close to the more elegiac side of Stéphane Grappelli’s playing, but always energetically charged with a richly expression-laden vein of classical and country music influences. The Rodgers and Hart standard ‘Wait Till You See Her’ is the only non-original, while the final track ‘Chic of Araby’ hails from Abercrombie’s pioneering work in the 1970s jazz-rock era, a kind of Velvet Underground-meets-Mahavishnu indo-psych groover. Yet even that track is full of the type of tippy-toe intimacy that the group brings to most of this set. It’s the kind of non-attention seeking jazz that has rewards aplenty for those prepared to snuggle up close enough.
Selwyn Harris