This is the third release from saxophonist Lovano’s Trio Tapestry project with the beautifully attuned, dynamically sensitive Marilyn Crispell (p) and Carmen Castaldi (d, pc). Like their previous ECM Trio Tapestry (2018) and Garden Of Expression (2019) it’s a most satisfying, largely rubato offering built on group interaction and identity of the highest order.
Structurally lucid while also open and freely improvised, this post-Coltrane chamber jazz fashions to meditative and spiritual effect a blend as airy as it is painterly of liquid, spaciously rendered melody, nudging and caressing cross-rhythms and chromatically adroit pianism. Sample All Twelve, The Power Of Three and Grace Notes, the eerie, gong-and-piano caressed last featuring Lovano on tarogato.
Coltrane has long been of special import to Lovano: think of the darkly cast, late-Trane-fired Sculpture from Universal Language (Blue Note, 1992). Charlie Haden featured on that memorable recording and his questing spirit is honoured here by Lovano in the solo One For Charlie. The charged lyricism which characterised Lovano’s lines on Steve Kuhn’s Mostly Coltrane (ECM, 2008) is equally evident in the rhapsodic title track of the present disc.
Like Charles Lloyd, but in his own way, Lovano has gone deeply into the spirit of Coltrane’s music and come out the other side, floating high and wide and digging deep to conjure freshly turned terrain for the engaged listener to explore and relish.
In a world where people pay serious money to see a show featuring avatars of ABBA, the literate, mellow and finely honed “real time” intelligence and musicality of Our Daily Bread is balm to the soul, extending as it does the vital dialectic of past, present and future which fires the life-force that is jazz. Bravo!
Discography
(1) All Twelve; Grace Notes; Le Petit Opportun; Our Daily Bread; (2) One For Charlie; (1) The Power Of Three; (3) Rhythm Spirit; (1) Crystal Ball (40.53)
(1) Lovano (ts, taragoto, gongs); Marilyn Crispell (p); Carmen Castaldi (d, gong, temple bells). (2) as (1) but Crispell and Castaldi out. (3) as (1) but Crispell out. Lugano, May 2022.
ECM 4877746
