Steve Kuhn, Steve Swallow & Joey Baron
Release Date: 30 April 2012
Label: ECM Records
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 602527945781
Genres: Jazz Contemporary
This new album takes a fresh look at several pieces heard in Kuhn's orchestral Promises Kept collection - his robust and adaptable compositions have often lent themselves to quite different interpretations - but alongside the aching balladry there is also some driving hard bop (on 'A Likely Story'), a brace of Swallow tunes ('Dark Glasses'), Carla Bley's gospel-tinged 'Permanent Wave' and the Brazilian 'Romance' by Dori Caymmi... In all, it's a varied programme that the trio seems to sail through effortlessly, master musicians beyond the need to prove anything, creating the agreeable illusion that this demanding music is playing itself.
Early on Steve Kuhn moved in exceptional company, playing with Chet Baker and Coleman Hawkins, and then in a band with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Briefly and famously, he was the first pianist of the John Coltrane Quartet and later worked with Stan Getz in a line-up with Scott LaFaro. At the end of the 1960s, Kuhn spent four years living in Europe, mostly in Scandinavia, but it was not until his return to the United States that he began his affiliation with ECM, resulting in a string of important albums. Three were reprised in the 2008 box set Life's Backward Glances: the solo album Ecstasy, and the quartet discs Motility and Playground (the latter with singer Sheila Jordan).
Personnel: Steve Kuhn (piano), Steve Swallow (bass), Joey Baron (drums)
Bennie Maupin; Herbie Hancock; Buster Williams; Frederick Waits; Billy Hart; Bill Summers; Charles
Olga Amelchenko
