The bassist Björn Meyer has been showcasing his wares across two decades for ECM, as a lead voice within the Swiss pianist Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin and also alongside the Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem. Born in Stockholm but based in Switzerland since 1996, he has co-led Bazar Blå whose blend of Scandinavian folk and aspects of world music the band themselves dubbed ‘transglobal tripfolk’ and Asita Hamidi’s Bazaar which worked closely for more than a decade until the Swiss-Persian harpist and vocalist’s untimely death at the end of 2012.
That was all before Provenance, his solo debut for ECM Records which arrived in 2017. While his previous work made him adept at translating local idioms onto the world stage – with Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin dabbling in ritual grooves and ‘zen funk’ while Souvenance his second album with Brahem arrived in the wake of the Arab Spring and carried political heft – on Provenance the electric bassist pared back his sound for a set of emotionally laden and atmospheric compositions which not only encroached upon but fully inhabited ambient territory as Meyer sought new pathways for both jazz and the bass guitar.
Meyer continues to perform alongside Anouar Brahem and is part of the Marcel Lüscher Quartett while he has also turned producer on a series of guitar studies, harmonium and custom pipe organ explorations by the Swiss ambient minimalist Zimoun.
Drenching his six-string electric bass in reverb and effects, Convergence his second solo album for ECM picks up where Provenance left off. Sonically it immediately reminds me of Mansur Brown’s recent solo standout Rihla with Brown approaching his art from a different background – as a classically-trained guitarist who came up in the London jazz scene alongside the likes of Nubya Garcia, Alfa Mist and Yussef Dayes, his sound mucking together elements of soul, R&B and even trap music as much as it draws from say flamenco or desert rock or Middle Eastern melodies exemplified by the sinuosity of the oud – but landing ultimately in a similar kind of post-rock or dark ambient space.
Convergence therefore is a reflection of jazz in a dark, limpid pool, more of a crossover or even third-stream project than a straight-ahead or free jazz record and in this it shares a certain habitat with plenty of other ECM outpourings, including Topos by the lyrist Sokratis Sinopoulos and pianist Yann Keerim or François Couturier and Dominique Pifarély’s dramatic chiaroscuro renderings on Preludes and Songs to take a couple of examples from the past year.
On the album opener and title piece ‘Convergence’ the bassist soon begins turning his instrument to curious ends, managing to conjure up these whooshing and scratching noises which add a gritty and grainy texture to his compositions without ever tramping the margins, instead seeming to emanate from the pith or heart of his strings. In fact Meyer is making use of live processing, adding delay and reverb in real-time among other extended techniques and special effects. Deft plucks navigate the terrain of his strings while big barrelling strums sound like the sudden revving of an engine, or that same engine stalling and sputtering out as when those strums ring dumb and mute as Meyer dampens the register.
Manfred Eicher the ECM founder is a bold editor as well as a deft and innovative producer, as it was at his suggestion that Meyer changed the original order of Convergence, allowing that big and moody opener to set the scene followed by the relatively spare ‘Hiver’ which is flamenco-flecked while traversing the rivers of Americana as Meyer engages with his folk roots writ large.
Sometimes his bass revving seems fathomless or to carry spectral portent, like on the slow, solitary and brooding ‘Drift’ which towards its close calls to mind slender, wafting gong rituals of a kind which one might associate with the performance of Buddhist rites in Japan or else Bidayuh culture through their agung ensembles.
‘Gravity’ is more roving and rambling, even kind of plummy or jammy as though one were scrambling their way through a blackberry bush or perhaps trawling for lingonberries, blueberries or even the prized hjortron or cloudberry in Meyer’s native Sweden (though as a longtime resident of northerly Umeå where berry picking is the norm, ‘Gravity’ reminds me more of the ambling stroll and upright scrape which blackberry picking entails down paths and hedgerows in the north east of England). The polymetric plucking of the strings produces an emotional to and fro, like tangled branches or gentle bumps in the road for an altogether encompassing effect.
By contrast the opening to ‘Motion’ sounds almost teary, with little hoots from Meyer’s pulls and picks serving to shape the piece as much as its watery motility, while ‘On Hope’ at first seems sodden and sullen but proves probing and artistically complex.
‘Magnétique’ takes the process further, with its muted and metallic sound arrived at via ‘a special construction of magnets, a spring and some drops of superglue’. As the album notes suggest, the sonics of the piece and its percussive quality evoke an amplified mbira, perhaps also with some of the donso ngoni as those plucks lose their tinniness and bound forth like stones skipping across the surface of a lake.
Finally on this transfixing and tonally original album, the closer ‘Nesodden’ – presumably named for the municipality in Norway – returns to the languorous pace and flamenco airs of ‘Hiver’, now a bit more pensive or even dolorous, as Meyer’s tremolo picking implies a restive baroque.
