Nik Bärtsch

CD version. Entendre is the first solo album for ECM by Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch, who had recorded for the label since 2006 with his bands Ronin and Mobile. Played on acoustic piano with no overdubs, it strips his ritual groove music down to two hands and lets the listener hear how his pieces are built. The French title points to listening as a creative act, to the patient unfolding of the pieces and to the dynamics of touch.

Bärtsch calls his compositions Module, numbered pieces that he treats as templates to be developed in different directions rather than fixed scores. Over the years he has recorded them with both groups, the funk-driven Ronin and the more acoustic Mobile. Here he revisits several of them alone, five numbered Moduls plus the closing Déjà-vu, Vienna. He had already made a solo piano record, Hishiryō, before joining ECM, and two Moduls appear on both. Entendre was recorded in September 2020 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, produced by Manfred Eicher with Stefano Amerio as engineer.

Modul 58_12 joins two pieces: a terse left-hand figure raises the tension until the tempo quickens, and the music resolves into a spare ending with dry, woody percussion from inside the instrument. Modul 55 opens with a strum of the strings and then moves calmly, with short rhythms rising and receding. Modul 26, at almost fourteen minutes the longest track, sets light right-hand melody over intricate left-hand ostinatos, its drama unfolding slowly. Throughout, composition and improvisation pass into each other with no audible seam. As John Bungey put it in London Jazz News, the results lean closer to zen than to funk.

John Lewis wrote in The Guardian that the album "might be his finest yet." In All About Jazz, Chris May praised the forensic clarity of Eicher's production and concluded: "'Entendre' is, literally, classic Bärtsch. It is also classic ECM." Jazzwise made it an Editor's Choice, with John Fordham surprised by how action-packed the set turned out. For Thom Jurek at AllMusic, Bärtsch alone proved as exciting as with Ronin and Mobile. Bungey was more reserved, finding that nothing here matched Ronin at full speed.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2703, released in 2021.