Tord Gustavsen Trio

LP version. Changing Places, released by ECM in 2003, was the first album by Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen as a leader. It set out the trio sound he has developed ever since: slow, songlike pieces that sound like standards in the making, drawn from gospel and chorale as much as from jazz. At the time the Munich daily Abendzeitung predicted it could reach listeners far beyond the specialist audience.

The trio is Gustavsen on piano, Harald Johnsen on double bass and Jarle Vespestad on drums. Both sidemen came from avant-garde jazz and experimental music, Vespestad from the electro-improv band Supersilent, yet both play here with great restraint. The album was recorded over two sessions in December 2001 and June 2002 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. All compositions are by Gustavsen. The same line-up went on to record The Ground and Being There for ECM.

It is brave to open a debut at the funereal pace of Deep as Love, and Gustavsen keeps most of the record slow or medium-slow. IGN is the only piece taken at a quicker tempo. Vespestad often plays with his bare hands, while Johnsen adds quiet, guitar-like solos. Song of Yearning recurs at the end as a two-minute piano solo, and Graceful Touch returns as a variation, so the sequence folds back on its own themes. Melodies stay simple, yet small harmonic deviations keep pulling them somewhere less settled.

The British and American press were quick to respond. In Stereophile (2003) Richard Lehnert called it "the least grandstanding great jazz album I have heard since Miles Davis' Kind of Blue", and concluded that Gustavsen had "created an instant classic". The Independent on Sunday named it the jazz debut of the year so far. For BBC Online Peter Marsh compared the tunes to the ballads of Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett, and Jazz Review made it Editor's Choice.

Double LP edition of ECM 1834, first released on CD in 2003 and issued on vinyl for the first time in 2025. It is cut from the original masters and comes in a tip-on gatefold with the original artwork. It is part of Luminessence, ECM's vinyl series launched in 2023 to reissue titles from the label's back catalogue in high-quality editions.