The Danish guitarist Jakob Bro keeps everything on a low simmer as he teams up with a cross-generational cast of improvisers for Taking Turns, his latest outing on ECM Records. And as that saucepan or crockpot begins to offer up a few bubbles, what ingredients do Bro and his ensemble add to the mix? The odd Latinate groove and a surf lick here or there courtesy of Bro and Bill Frisell or Andrew Cyrille from behind the drum kit, with Frisell also playing gentle patterns of harmonics as Thomas Morgan makes bounding gestures on the double bass, more than capable of enlivening even the most placid composition.
Taking Turns is a spacious and expansive set, whose furrowing and felted melodies rarely fall into a deep groove because everything here is conditional, up to the shifting moods and tenors of the collective. The music on the album was actually recorded a decade ago in New York City, a few years after Bro had stepped out from the Danish jazz scene as a leader thanks to such acclaimed efforts as Pearl River, Balladeering and Time which variously featured the bassist Morgan, the guitarist Frisell and the saxophonist Lee Konitz plus the drummer and bandleader Paul Motian, with Bro having held down the right channel on the Paul Motian Band’s wistful yet agile 2006 album Garden of Eden.
Taking Turns then was captured between the release of Bro’s own December Song where he joined up once again with Konitz, Morgan and Frisell to complete his Balladeering trilogy just a few months after Motian’s death, as Craig Taborn added seasonal warmth on the piano, and his debut as a leader for ECM, which arrived in the form of the flighty yet resonant Gefion in 2015 as Bro and Morgan deepened their connection while the legendary Jan Garbarek and Keith Jarrett drummer Jon Christensen made up the trio.
Around the same time Bro had also been collaborating with the producer Thomas Knak, best known for his glitch electronics under the monicker Opiate and for programming a couple of tracks on Bjƶrk’s wintery opus Vespertine, while on Hymnotic / Salmodisk the guitarist turned big band leader as he set to wax the folkish thrum of his tentet. In the years since Bro has continued to lead small ensembles for ECM playing alongside the likes of Morgan, Palle Mikkelborg, Marilyn Mazur, Joe Lovano and Arve Henriksen.
Strands last year marked Palle Mikkelborg’s return to the stage, as Jakob Bro ushered the trumpeter – who is probably best known for the Aura suite which he composed in tribute to Miles Davis, so enamouring the jazz icon that he returned to a big band setting and released the suite as his final album in 1989 – and the kindred percussionist Marilyn Mazur through a performance at the DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen. Drawing mostly from Bro’s albums Gefion and Returnings, on Strands the trio of Danish improvisers gazed out over a low tide as Bro’s rippling guitar laid the canvas for Mikkelborg’s winsome spouts of trumpet and flugelhorn while over by the rock pool, Mazur daubed on the drums, struck budding gongs and bowed metals.
This new release might seem like a curious follow-up to that live album, comprised as it is of decade-old material, and while Taking Turns is typically explorative yet mild the seven pieces selected here are certainly strong enough to go out into the world, the only explanation for the delay being that both Bro and ECM presumably decided to head in another direction with Gefion. Described as a snapshot of Bro’s music in a period of transition, the lapse in time has however rendered Taking Turns as something definitive, given that the record now draws a curtain on Bro’s series of collaborations with Lee Konitz, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 92 years old.
Indeed the scope of this sextet would be hard to match, from Konitz whose name evokes those Birth of the Cool sessions where his distinctive alto played astride Gerry Mulligan’s tenor saxophone under the auspices of Miles Davis, to Frisell whose lilting melodicism and sunswept America helped to define the ECM sound of the eighties and Andrew Cyrille who started out under Walt Dickerson and Ahmed Abdul-Malik then embraced free jazz by way of Cecil Taylor and Milford Graves, before establishing his own longstanding trio among so many other collaborations.
That’s a history of jazz in three figures which stretches all the way back to the fifties, taking in cool jazz and the first prods of the avant-garde plus the New York downtown scene and some of the currents from European chamber and improvisational settings. Thomas Morgan has circled some of the same spheres as Bro, playing alongside Motian and Frisell while their own collaborative partnership now spans more than ten years and about as many records, while the pianist Jason Moran who has an illustrious background as a leader and educator – crossing over with some of the other players courtesy of his collaborations with Charles Lloyd, Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman, Paul Motian and Trio 3 – was nevertheless the only session participant with whom Bro had not previously worked as the sextet embarked on Avatar Studios in the spring of 2014.
Bro and company start out in fine fettle, with Konitz taking the lead on the opening track ‘Black Is All Colors at Once’ as his burnished and yearning alto sax peeks through the clouds over the genteel if somewhat rickety arpeggios of the leader and Frisell, while Cyrille steadily unfolds the skittering possibilities of his drum kit. A hanging bassline and some twinkling keys further open up the piece, as harmonics and a few deft cymbal crashes briefly pervade ‘Black Is All Colors at Once’ with a glimmering surf atmosphere, before the balmy and breezy ‘Haiti’ finds Konitz making a rare foray on the soprano saxophone. Recounting their shared history together from Balladeering in 2009, the bandleader Bro says of Konitz:
I felt I had found a direction that worked for me when Lee started playing my pieces. That might seem obvious, taking the greatness of Konitz as an improviser into consideration, but for me it was a revelation. From day one, Lee was quite freely interpreting my music, playing around the melodies, hinting at them, not necessarily playing them as written. And it made me think in a new way about how much music I should bring in, how much direction I should give, for the group sound to find its own natural balance and flow. That’s something I’ve been exploring ever since.
All of the compositions on Taking Turns are credited to Bro, though in practise they owe to the skills as well as the equanimity of the ensemble. ‘Milford Sound’ refers to the great percussionist Milford Graves and to the popular fjord on the southwest coast of New Zealand, which was hailed by Rudyard Kipling as the eighth wonder of the world, while on ‘Aarhus’ between the inquisitive strings and crisp cymbals it is Moran’s piano which glosses or extends with the rippling effect of a stone the thoughtful and plangent saxophone lines of Konitz.
On the other hand ‘Pearl River’ suggests a lustrous or pristine site of natural beauty, yet the piece is in fact named after the iconic three-floor Asian mart along Broadway in New York City, managing to split the difference as its vexed waters and churned sediment also conjure ornate attire, stacked shelves or throngs of customers and the furtive thrill of the chase. ‘Peninsula’ meanwhile is an especially deft exploration of timbre from the folds and pleats and aching stumbles of Konitz’s saxophone to wiry plucks of guitar and bass, with the composition despite the anachronism reminding me of Stephan Crump’s engrossing album Slow Water from earlier this year.
There are bent notes and harmonics, the tarrying of Morgan’s bass and plaintive yet pleasantly tart plunks of piano all working crosswise and playing counterpoint for a woven effect. It is perhaps one of the busiest explorations of placidity you might hope to find, before the closer ‘Mar del Plata’ with its sloshing rhythms and bronzed melodies summons up fond memories for Bro of touring through Argentina and especially the resort city on the Atlantic coast. Well worth the wait, Taking Turns is lowkey one of the most interesting albums of the year, whose hint of the seaside and the tropics serves as welcome respite now as we head into the wintry season.
