And If is the second ECM album by the Israeli pianist Anat Fort and the first recording of her working trio with the bassist Gary Wang and the drummer Roland Schneider. By then the three had played together for ten years and hundreds of concerts. Fort wrote all ten pieces, and the two that open and close the disc carry the name of her mentor Paul Motian.
Her ECM story began with A Long Story, recorded in Brooklyn in 2004 in a quartet with Motian, who recommended the session to Manfred Eicher. It came out in 2007 and drew wide press attention. For the follow-up Eicher brought the trio over to Rainbow Studio in Oslo, where they recorded in February 2009 with the engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug. The album was issued in August 2010. Born in Tel Aviv and largely based in New York, Fort studied classical piano as a child, a background Ian Mann of The Jazz Mann heard in the flowing ballad En If.
Mann describes the opening Paul Motian (1) as crystalline piano and filigree percussion over Wang's resonant bass. The centrepiece, Something 'Bout Camels, reworks a tune first heard on A Long Story. Here it starts from almost subliminal arco bass, passes through solo piano into an insistent modal vamp with a faintly Middle Eastern air, and ends with the bow again. Lanesboro is close to a hymn, and with Minnesota it evokes wide American spaces. The short Nu, with its jagged rhythms, is the most assertive piece in the set, and the closing Paul Motian (2) returns to the opening theme in a more abstract form.
In DownBeat, Paul de Barros compared the childlike, folky quality to Keith Jarrett, but found "something warm and luxuriant in Fort's minimalist approach". Hrayr Attarian of All About Jazz called it "an intellectually satisfying yet emotionally charged CD". Mann, writing in September 2010, heard a typical ECM release, immaculately crafted and very melodic. He granted that some listeners had found it a little bloodless, but praised the delicate interplay of a band that had grown up together.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2109, first released on 20 August 2010.
