Wolfert Brederode Trio

Black Ice is the first trio album by the Dutch pianist Wolfert Brederode, after two quartet records for ECM, Currents and Post Scriptum. ECM's own description finds the title apt for music with "gleaming lyricism, transparency, and hint of danger". Thirteen short pieces, most under six minutes, favour space, clear melody and close listening over virtuoso display. It is a classic piano trio record in the ECM sense, quiet and exact.

Brederode wrote twelve of the pieces. The thirteenth, Conclusion, comes from the Icelandic bassist Gulli Gudmundsson, a partner of some two decades in settings ranging from free improvisation to theatre music. Drummer Jasper van Hulten completes the trio, a tone-sensitive player who adds detail rather than drive. The album was recorded in July 2015 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. The dark cover photograph is by Fotini Potamia, and two brief variations, of Bemani and Fall, work as interludes in the sequence.

Olive Tree, the second track, is the piece several critics singled out. Gudmundsson lays down a bluesy bass line, van Hulten plays a syncopated, Latin-tinged pattern, and Brederode's stop-start melody moves over dense left-hand chords. The title track sets an icy theme over a portentous bass line and scratchy cymbal work, so the sense of danger grows as it goes. Fall appears twice. The full version rests on a slow rock beat with piano and bass in counterpoint, while the short variation near the end turns darker, with arco bass glissandi and heavy piano chords.

In DownBeat, where the album was an Editor's Pick, Bobby Reed called it "a quintessential ECM album" and noted how Eicher lets Brederode's line on Olive Tree breathe. Robert Shore of Jazzwise heard "sleek and sinuous melodic invention from an empathetic classic piano trio". Michael Tucker of Jazz Journal also named Olive Tree the outstanding track, for its rhythmically charged space and cross-rhythmic tension. For James Poore at MusicWeb International it was meditative, elegant late-night listening, though he found the title track less convincing than the rest.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2476, first released on 1 April 2016.