Celestial Circle is the first recording by the song-oriented quartet of percussionist Marilyn Mazur, a group first assembled for her season as artist-in-residence at Norway's Molde Jazz Festival in 2008. Born in New York and raised in Denmark, Mazur toured with Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Gil Evans in the late 1980s, then spent 14 years in the Jan Garbarek Group. Here her drums, gongs, cymbals and bells work as a source of melody as much as rhythm.
The Swedish singer Josefine Cronholm makes her ECM debut. She had worked with Mazur in the Percussion Paradise ensemble. Since the mid-1990s, when she sang with Django Bates's Human Chain, she has been counted among the most original European jazz vocalists of her generation. Pianist John Taylor, long associated with Kenny Wheeler, John Surman and the trio Azimuth, returns to ECM after several years away. Bassist Anders Jormin, a long-term member of the Bobo Stenson Trio, completes the line-up. The album was recorded in December 2010 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Fourteen pieces alternate songs and instrumentals by Mazur with short trios and duos improvised by the group. The opener, Your Eyes, has music by Taylor and words by Cronholm, and the instrumentalists move around the shape of her vocal line. In Winterspell, with words and music by Mazur, piano and metal percussion set a wintry scene before the voice comes in. The duos are miniatures: Secret Crystals pairs Mazur with Taylor, Oceanique with Jormin. Wordless vocals run through Temple Chorus and Drumrite, and the pairing of Cronholm's and Mazur's voices, first tried in Percussion Paradise, is developed further.
Critics praised the space in the music. "What really marks the quartet out is the incredible sense of space it creates," wrote Peter Quinn on The Arts Desk. In The Guardian, John Fordham heard metallic ripples and low booms washing around Cronholm's clear voice, and singled out the empathy between pianist and bassist. BBC Music Magazine gave the album five stars in 2012. Its reviewer, Roger Thomas, called it "a disciplined take on a music, which tends towards the intuitive and abstract".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2228, released on 10 June 2011.
