Benedikt Jahnel Trio

Equilibrium is the ECM debut of the trio led by the German pianist Benedikt Jahnel, with the Spanish bassist Antonio Miguel and the Brooklyn-based drummer Owen Howard. Years of touring had made it a tight unit, and its sound comes from a productive tension. Jahnel thinks in exact rhythmic subdivisions, Howard phrases in long melodic arcs, and Miguel often mediates between them. All seven pieces are Jahnel's, and they balance written structure against open group improvisation.

Jahnel and Howard first met when Howard was a guest professor at Berlin's Universität der Künste. The bond grew in 2005 and 2006, when Jahnel spent two years in New York, and there Miguel, then finishing his studies with John Patitucci, completed the group. Their first album, Modular Concepts, appeared on Material Records in 2008. ECM listeners may know Jahnel from Cyminology, and he has also played with Phil Woods, Charlie Mariano, Dave Liebman and John Abercrombie. In a second life he researches mathematics at the Ruhr University in Bochum. Equilibrium was recorded in July 2011 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.

Jahnel wants a solo to be a group effort rather than a line over accompaniment, and the opening Gently Understood develops its improvised sections with all three players together. The centrepiece is the fourteen-minute Moorland & Hill Land, built on a piano ostinato that Jahnel consciously developed from a piece on Modular Concepts. Around the more structured compositions the trio placed a few sketchier pieces centred on sound, written with the Lugano room in mind. Augmented and Hidden Beauty, two short, rubato pieces, lead into the title track.

Reviewing the album in 2012 for Between Sound and Space, his archive of ECM reviews, Tyran Grillo compared the muted-string opening to the work of Nik Bärtsch's Ronin. He found that Howard's "delicate interactions between snare and cymbals make 'Wrangel' the most rhythmically deft track of the set". Jahnel himself links the title to analogies he sees between music and mathematics, both concerned with questions of balance.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2251, first released in September 2012.