Chants is the first recording by the trio of pianist Craig Taborn, with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Gerald Cleaver, after eight years of playing together. It followed his solo ECM album Avenging Angel and takes a similarly independent line on the piano trio. Taborn wrote the nine pieces around the particular skills of his partners, and the music moves between density and open space without settling into the usual roles of soloist and accompaniment.

The three know each other well. Taborn and Cleaver met about 25 years earlier as students at the University of Michigan, worked together in Detroit, and made their ECM debuts in 1997 in Roscoe Mitchell's Note Factory. Taborn first knew Morgan as a teenage student at the Manhattan School of Music, and later played with him in David Binney's group. At the time Morgan and Cleaver were also half of Tomasz Stańko's New York Quartet. "I'd much rather engage with the group, always, than have the format be 'piano adventures with supporting cast'", Taborn said. The album was recorded at Avatar Studios, New York, in June 2012, with James Farber as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The writing uses polyrhythms and nested rhythmic layers, which the players have absorbed so fully that the difficulty is never the subject. Beat The Ground sets Cleaver's independent, almost soloistic drumming over a pulsing piano pattern doubled by the bass. In Chant is a slow ballad that opens as a duet and gives Morgan room for a solo while Taborn comps quietly. Later in the album the music grows more abstract, until the piano offers little more than bell-like strokes on Silver Days Or Love.

In The New York Times, Nate Chinen called it "the extraordinary new record by Craig Taborn, a pianist of cryptic insights and galactic interests". He heard shadows of second-wave Detroit techno in the asymmetrical pulses of two tracks, alongside flickers of Duke Ellington and Herbie Nichols. In DownBeat, Ken Micallef found songs that "flutter and spiral, bend and float, and constantly surprise". Other reviewers pointed to Paul Bley as a point of comparison.

CD edition, ECM 2326, first released in April 2013.