Martin Speake

Change of Heart brought the British alto saxophonist Martin Speake to ECM in 2006, leading a quartet with Bobo Stenson on piano, Mick Hutton on double bass and Paul Motian on drums. The album holds eight Speake originals. They are mostly slow, lyrical and open-ended, and they drift in and out of a fixed pulse without losing their melodies.

Speake studied classical saxophone at Trinity College of Music in London, then joined the saxophone quartet Itchy Fingers. The group won the Schlitz Young Jazz Musicians of the Year award in 1986, and he left in 1988 to lead his own projects. This quartet was already a working band before it went into the studio. In The Irish Times, Ray Comiskey recalled its earlier visits to Ireland and noted that the album came after two tours. The session took place in April 2002 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo. Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered it and Manfred Eicher produced.

Speake's alto is clear and cool, with something of Lee Konitz in it, but his writing favours long, aching lines that take sudden turns. The Healing Power of Intimacy sets the unhurried tone, and the session rarely speeds up. The scurrying Barefaced Thieves is the main exception, a brief gallop among the ballads. In Three Hours, the second-to-last piece, Hutton's big, resonant bass holds the yearning music together while the saxophone rises over it. Stenson and Speake trade and interlace phrases throughout. Motian gives the slow pieces a surprising amount of rhythmic incident, and at moments the group edges towards bebop.

The reviews were unusually warm. In JazzTimes Thomas Conrad wrote that the album "makes a compelling case that Martin Speake is one of the most interesting and rewarding alto saxophonists now playing jazz on any continent." For Jazzwise, Duncan Heining heard pieces "located on the fringes of abstraction" that still "remain highly melodic." Comiskey gave the record five stars. In The Guardian, John Fordham likened Hutton's bass to that of Charlie Haden and singled out Motian, who can draw more rhythmic variety from slow music than almost any drummer. Jazzpodium found Motian in top form, rarely heard playing so assertively.

CD, ECM 1831, recorded in 2002 and first released by ECM Records in April 2006.