Joe Lovano, Marilyn Crispell, Carmen Castaldi, Trio Tapestry

CD version. Garden of Expression is the second album by Trio Tapestry, the group of saxophonist Joe Lovano with pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Carmen Castaldi. It follows Trio Tapestry from 2019, Lovano's first ECM album as leader. There is no bass, and the trio works in open time, with long silences and melodies that carry the momentum. Lovano puts it plainly: "Each of the pieces is a song of expression where rhythm doesn't dictate the flow."

The three go back a long way. Castaldi is a childhood friend of Lovano's from Cleveland: they played in bands together and were at Berklee at the same time. Lovano met Crispell in the mid-1980s, when she was in Anthony Braxton's group, and later sat in with her trio at the Village Vanguard. Trio Tapestry's first concert was entirely improvised, and a tape of it sent to Manfred Eicher started the project. This second album was recorded in November 2019 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, the day after a concert in the same hall, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Eicher producing.

All eight pieces are Lovano's, many of them written on the road. Besides tenor he plays soprano saxophone, tárogató and gongs, at times striking a gong while he plays the horn. Chapel Song, which opens the album, grew from hearing a distant organ in a Viennese church. West of the Moon answers East of the Sun, which he played every night on tour with Diana Krall in the summer of 2019. The title piece leaves Crispell room to break out, still with restraint, and the closing Zen Like sets soprano saxophone against the gongs.

On its release in 2021, John Fordham wrote in The Guardian that the record "is about the spaces between sounds as much as sounds themselves". In DownBeat, J.D. Considine pointed to its emotional range, "from the spare, prayerful asceticism of 'Zen Like'" to the sweep of the title tune. Several reviewers related the trio's loose, floating time to Lovano's long tenure with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell, a comparison Lovano himself makes.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2685, first released on 29 January 2021.