Anat Fort Trio, Gianluigi Trovesi

Birdwatching is the third ECM album by the Israeli pianist Anat Fort, and the first to add a guest to her long-standing trio. The guest is the Italian reedman Gianluigi Trovesi, heard here on alto clarinet. Twelve short pieces, almost all by Fort, alternate quartet music with improvised solo piano, and the sequence unfolds as a series of vignettes drawn from the movements of birds and weather.

Fort and Trovesi had already played together for several years, first as a duo at the Novara Jazz Festival in Italy and later with the trio at the Tel Aviv Opera House. It was Fort who proposed the recording to Manfred Eicher. Her rhythm section is the one heard on her earlier ECM trio album And If: Gary Wang on double bass and Roland Schneider on drums, who has played with her since 1998. The session took place in November 2013 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and RSI Rete Due as partner. Fort explains the title as a matter of "watching, listening, waiting", outside in nature and inwardly, watching "that inner bird, the soul".

The title steers the set. Sunrise is evoked in quiet solo-piano harmonies, and courtship in the exchanges between piano and clarinet. Earth Talks is a duet for Fort and Trovesi that follows a lilting line. In Not The Perfect Storm, the longest track, Schneider's tom-tom rolls open the way for the clarinet's dark, woody tone over piano and bass. The two parts of Song of the Phoenix are built on call and response between Fort and Trovesi, while Inner Voices is a collective improvisation credited to all four players.

Writing in The Guardian, John Fordham described Fort as a composer "with a knack for deceptively simple-sounding tunes that are usually elegant and frequently exquisite". He also heard Fort and Trovesi improvise animatedly on Murmuration without getting in each other's way. Mike Collins of London Jazz News called the record "a gently glowing gem of an album". German critics heard chamber-music delicacy in the quartet pieces, and echoes of Israeli folk song in the way Fort shapes a melody.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2382, first released on 19 February 2016.