Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz, Michal Miskiewicz

Faithful is the third ECM album by the Polish trio of pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz, after Trio and January. It balances energy and lyricism, written structure and the moment, across ten pieces. Five are new Wasilewski originals, and the rest come from Hanns Eisler, Ornette Coleman, Paul Bley, Hermeto Pascoal and the standard Ballad of the Sad Young Men. The album takes its name from the Coleman tune.

The three met as schoolchildren and have played together as a trio since the mid-1990s. Wasilewski and Kurkiewicz were also the pianist and bassist of the Tomasz Stanko Quartet on Soul of Things, Suspended Night and Lontano. Both also appear on Manu Katché's ECM albums Neighbourhood and Playground. Faithful was recorded in August 2010 at the Auditorio RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The album opens with Eisler's An den kleinen Radioapparat, a song written in 1942 in Hollywood exile, played here with lyrical piano and fine cymbal work from Miskiewicz. Night Train To You, a Wasilewski original of more than ten minutes, imitates the motion of a train through shifting metres, from 6/8 to 11/8, and slows down in a gentle coda. The title piece comes from Coleman's 1966 album The Empty Foxhole and gives Kurkiewicz his first extended solo of the set. Song For Swirek is dedicated to the memory of Marek Świerkowski, a close friend of the trio.

Stanko had said of the group that "in the entire history of Polish jazz we've never had a band like this one." In JazzTimes, Brent Burton wrote: "Turn it up loud or turn it down low; either way, it's one of the best piano-trio recordings you'll hear this year." Writing for The Jazz Mann in 2011, Ian Mann felt the album confirmed the trio's place among Europe's leading piano trios. John Kelman at All About Jazz called it the trio's best yet.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2208, first released on 1 April 2011, with a cover photograph by Thomas Wunsch.