Thomas Strønen, Ayumi Tanaka, Marthe Lea

CD version. Bayou is the debut of a trio led by Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen with pianist Ayumi Tanaka and clarinettist, singer and percussionist Marthe Lea. Apart from the title piece, built on a traditional Norwegian tune, everything here was improvised collectively in the moment. The result is quiet, spare music in which silence weighs as much as sound, moving between contemporary classical music, folk and jazz.

The group first met at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, where Strønen teaches and where Tanaka and Lea were students, gathering regularly for open-ended sessions. Strønen and Tanaka had already played together in his ensemble Time Is A Blind Guide. While in Munich to finish work on that group's Lucus, Strønen played Manfred Eicher a one-microphone recording of the trio's very first concert, and Eicher proposed a studio date. Bayou was recorded in August 2018 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Lara Persia as engineer and Eicher producing.

The improvisations are named after rivers, lakes and waterways, a nod to the fluid music and to the recording location in Lugano. The title track opens the album with a whisper of piano, brushed snare and a deep bass drum, before Lea sings the old folk melody over a skeletal backing. Her voice returns alone on the one-minute Bayou II. These were the first times she had sung with the trio, though she grew up singing folk songs. Elsewhere her clarinet is a soft, sparing presence, as on Varsha and Como. Tanaka's piano offers a few notes at a time and Strønen works his kit, bells and gongs with great restraint.

Reviewers stressed the album's concentration. Writing in London Jazz News in 2021, Jon Bungey noted that "every sound has intention and awareness". He heard the folk fragment as the only composed element in an album of free improvisation, recorded in perfect sound. In Jazz Journal the same year, Simon Adams described "rarefied, sometimes abstract music-making with minimalism and restraint always to the fore", and found it very beautiful.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2633, first released on 9 April 2021.