Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Colley, Brian Blade

CD version. Dance Of The Elders is the second album by the trio of Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel with bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade, after Angular Blues (2020), and his third trio record for ECM. Five originals sit beside a song by Kurt Weill and Joni Mitchell's Amelia, which closes the set, in music shaped as much by folk and classical forms as by jazz. It is a quiet, closely knit record, made by a working band after long tours.

The three recorded it in February 2022 at 25th Street Recording in Oakland, California, with Jeff Cressman as engineer, after touring Europe, the United States and Japan. Manfred Eicher produced the album and mixed it at Studios La Buissonne with Muthspiel and Gérard de Haro. Muthspiel plays classical and electric guitar, the first built by Jim Redgate, the second by Domenico Moffa. Blade was also part of his earlier trio with Larry Grenadier, heard on Driftwood (2014), and he has worked with Mitchell in the past.

The ten-minute Invocation opens the album, a slow piece in two parts that Eicher chose to put first. Electric guitar, bells and a looped riff build gradually towards a bluesy solo. Prelude To Bach began as a spontaneous studio improvisation on classical guitar and ends with a solo reading of the chorale O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, which Muthspiel had not prepared in advance. Weill's Liebeslied, from The Threepenny Opera, has him on electric guitar, weaving bop lines around Colley and Blade.

In DownBeat, Brian Morton compared the group's empathy with that of the Bill Evans trio and wrote that "the synthesis here is hugely confident and successful". Jazz Magazine gave the album its Choc award. For London Jazz News in 2023, Julian Maynard-Smith heard "three simpatico players at the top of their game" and a wider sonic and emotional range than on the trio's earlier albums. In the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, Peter Rüedi described the record as the result of that intense live experience, made by three partners less interested in display than in a shared sound.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2772, released on 29 September 2023.