On Coda the Austrian trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler reworks music from several phases of his career into five new orchestral suites. It is a personal selection of favourite pieces written between 1975 and 2010. The booklet defines the title as "a concluding statement", built on elaborations of thematic material from past works. It continues the idea of The Jazz Composer's Orchestra Update (2014), but with a chamber orchestra of mostly classical players in place of an augmented big band.
The orchestra is conducted by Christoph Cech, who also led the 2014 project. Its scoring takes in flute, oboe, clarinets, horn, trombone, tuba, a string section, vibraphone and marimba. The main soloists are Mantler himself on trumpet, guitarist Bjarne Roupé and pianist David Helbock. The music was recorded in September 2019 at the Porgy & Bess studio in Vienna, as an ECM production in collaboration with the club. Additional recording, mixing and mastering followed at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, and Mantler produced the album himself.
Two sources are the WATT albums 13 & 3/4 and Alien. The others are Folly Seeing All This from 1992 and three ECM records, Cerco un paese innocente, For Two and Hide and Seek. The TwoThirteen Suite grows out of the 1975 piece 13. The Alien Suite sets jagged electric guitar against heated trumpet. The closing HideSeek Suite, comes from the 2001 album on which Robert Wyatt sang words by Paul Auster, but here it does without voices. It opens on a solemn mix of guitar and strings and ends in a storm of strings, horns and flute.
Critics were divided. In The Wire Julian Cowley called the album "an outstanding success" and compared Mantler's sense of cadence to Beckett's prose, describing him as "a master of anxiety and apprehensiveness". Andy Hamilton, in Jazz Journal (2021), praised the solos but found the music "finely crafted but strangely unmoving". Several writers heard dark, dense writing that moves between jazz and new music without settling in either.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2697, released in July 2021, with all compositions by Mantler.
