Encore is the companion to Résumé, and the second album that the German bassist Eberhard Weber built from his own past. For years his solo spots on tour with the Jan Garbarek Group were improvised in front of an audience. Here he isolates those bass solos, recorded live between 1990 and 2007, and turns them into thirteen new pieces by adding keyboard parts in the studio. A stroke in 2007 had ended his playing career, so this is music made with old material by a musician who could no longer perform it.
The thirteen solos come from concerts in European cities from Edinburgh to Seville, and each track carries the name of the place where it was taped. Walter Speckmann and Gert Rickmann-Wunderlich made the live recordings. Gérard de Haro and Sun Chung mixed and edited the new layers in November 2014 at Studios La Buissonne, in the south of France. Manfred Eicher produced. The guest is the Dutch flugelhorn player Ack van Rooyen, who had played on Weber's ECM debut as a leader, The Colours of Chloë, in 1974.
Van Rooyen appears on six of the thirteen tracks, from the opening Frankfurt to Hannover. On Klagenfurt a synthesized marimba fills the space around a short, burnished flugelhorn solo. Bradford begins almost like a metronome, and a similar keyboard texture gives both the pulse and the melodic foil for the bass. Underneath everything is the electric upright bass that Weber pioneered, with its long sustain, electronic loops and chordal treatments.
Reviewers were divided. John Kelman of All About Jazz called the method "a kind of reverse-engineered approach to composition". Patrick Hadfield in London Jazz News found the result "virtuosic but relaxed, and sometimes almost ambient", and thought it might change the minds of listeners wary of bass solos. Roger Thomas in BBC Music Magazine was cooler, judging that the added material was "by turns over-egged and oddly bland". Weber himself spoke of becoming a composer of new music who makes use of old things, and suggested Encore might be his last album.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2439, first released on 6 February 2015.
