Michael Mantler, Himiko Paganotti, Max Brand Ensemble

Comment c'est, subtitled How It Is, is a song cycle in ten parts for voice and chamber ensemble by the Austrian trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler. After a long run of largely abstract work, Mantler wrote that he was "no longer able to ignore overwhelming and outrageous recent world events". His own texts, sung in French by Himiko Paganotti, deal with war, terrorism, hostages, migration, poverty and fear, in what he calls "the all-pervading environment of hatred, greed and corruption."

Mantler was born in Vienna in 1943, moved to the United States in 1962 and, with Carla Bley, led the Jazz Composer's Orchestra and founded the WATT label in 1973. He returned to Europe in 1991. Here his trumpet joins Paganotti, a French-born singer known for her work with Magma, and the Max Brand Ensemble, a twelve-piece chamber group conducted by Christoph Cech, with David Helbock on piano. The cycle was recorded in April 2016 at the Porgy & Bess studio in Vienna, with additional recording and mastering at Studios La Buissonne in June and July 2016. Mantler produced it himself.

The ensemble is unusual: flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, tuba, two violins, viola, cello, double bass and vibraphone or marimba. The songs are through-composed, and Mantler's trumpet solos are the only improvised element. Titles such as Intolérance, Guerre, Commerce and Folie name each subject plainly, while Hiver is sung from the point of view of someone living through a war. Sans fin, almost fourteen minutes long, is the centre of the cycle and its most impassioned song, yet Paganotti's delivery stays grave and controlled. The title recalls Samuel Beckett's 1961 novel, translated as How It Is. Beckett has long been one of Mantler's sources, from the Beckett texts of his WATT album No Answer onwards.

Writing on his blog The Blue Moment in January 2018, Richard Williams called it an "agitprop song cycle" and concluded that "every minute of the album, all the way to its bleak ending, rewards concentrated attention." In London Jazz News the same year, Jane Mann heard the grimmest lyrics she had ever encountered, adding that "Paganotti sings with dignity and poignancy, there is no melodrama, anywhere". Reviewing it for ECM Reviews in 2019, Tyran Grillo heard the cycle as closing a circle opened by Folly Seeing All This, Mantler's first ECM project.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2537, released on 3 November 2017.