Nik Bärtsch's Ronin

CD version. Awase is the first studio album in eight years by Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, the Swiss band whose music its pianist and composer calls "ritual groove music". The title is a term from aikido, which Bärtsch practises, and means moving together, matching another's energy. It fits a record made by a slimmer, more transparent Ronin, now a quartet, where interlocking patterns, minimalist repetition and funk pulse are shared out among four players.

Since Llyrìa (2010) and the concert album Live (2012), the line-up had changed. Percussionist Andi Pupato left without being replaced, and Thomy Jordi took over from Björn Meyer, playing four-string electric bass where Meyer used six. Alongside Nik Bärtsch on piano are Sha (Stefan Haslebacher) on bass clarinet and alto saxophone and Kaspar Rast on drums. The album was recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, in October 2017, with Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.

As always, Bärtsch's pieces carry numbers rather than names. Three of the six revisit older material: Modul 36 first appeared on Stoa (2006), Ronin's ECM debut, and Modul 34 had been played for years before reaching the studio here. The centre of the album is Modul 58, eighteen minutes long, where a figure in five and one in seven seem to pull against each other and the groove survives even when Rast stops playing. A, the first composition by Sha on a Ronin record, is slower and chant-like, its long descending lines growing from almost nothing.

Critics noticed the new lightness. In Jazzwise, John Fordham found that much of the set "has an exuberant and open feel" the band's studio work had sometimes lacked. In DownBeat, Kurt Gottschalk noted that the leader now commands less of the spotlight than before and called the record "a compelling album" from start to finish. Peter Hum in the Ottawa Citizen and others pointed to the clarity of the La Buissonne sound, essential for a music built on exactitude, where each interlocking line has to be followed.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2603, released on 4 May 2018, in a jewel case with O-card and a 12-page booklet.