Driftwood is the first ECM album under the name of the Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, a trio record with the American bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Brian Blade. Its eight pieces move between acoustic and electric guitar, seven of them his own compositions. The music is quiet, lyrical and closely argued. The three players leave each other a great deal of space.
Muthspiel had made his first appearance on the label shortly before, on Travel Guide, a cooperative guitar trio with Ralph Towner and Slava Grigoryan. He had already worked with Grenadier and Blade for years, live and on record, and the familiarity is audible. The session took place in May 2013 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. The short title track is a free improvisation by all three, recorded at Eicher's suggestion. Muthspiel has said that he wrote the pieces with Eicher's sound aesthetic in mind.
The opener Joseph is, in the guitarist's words, a tune of his own played "in super slow motion". Its link to Joe Zawinul came afterwards, when he heard something of Zawinul in the way he played it. Uptown rests on a simple acoustic riff and leaves room for a nimble solo by Grenadier. On Cambiata and Madame Vonn the acoustic guitar also leads, with Grenadier's woody bass close beside it and Blade working mostly with brushes. Highline is the most assertive piece, its overdriven electric chords building over an increasingly active rhythm section. The closing Bossa for Michael Brecker thanks the late saxophonist. Muthspiel admired the way Brecker played over chord changes.
Reviewers placed the record within a long line of ECM guitar music. In All About Jazz John Kelman heard echoes of early Towner records in the nylon-string pieces and of John Abercrombie in the electric ones, and found the music "filled with suggestive implication". Thomas Conrad wrote in JazzTimes that the album is "a haunting soundtrack to a movie not yet made". German critics singled out the recorded sound. Manfred Papst in the NZZ am Sonntag praised its vivid, three-dimensional quality.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2349, first released on 16 May 2014.
