Guamba is a 1987 quartet album by bassist Gary Peacock, one of the production projects of that decade on which ECM gathered strong players around his compositions. The bass is a lead voice from the first note, and the title piece is a Peacock solo. Around him are saxophonist Jan Garbarek, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and drummer Peter Erskine, each with real room to play.
Peacock and Garbarek had already recorded together on Voice From The Past - Paradigm in Oslo in 1981, with Tomasz Stanko and Jack DeJohnette. For Guamba the brass chair went to Mikkelborg, on trumpet and flugelhorn, while Erskine played drums and drum computer and Garbarek tenor and soprano saxophones. The session took place in March 1987 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher. All the music is Peacock's, except Thyme Time, written with Erskine. In the same month Erskine was also at Rainbow Studio for Second Sight, the second album by Marc Johnson's Bass Desires. The seven pieces run to about 44 minutes.
The short title track, three minutes of solo bass, sounds more like a lullaby than a statement of rhythm, and it sets the gentle register of much that follows. Lila, at thirteen minutes the longest piece, opens with Peacock alone, cymbals falling around him like drops. Thyme Time is the lively exception, with Erskine in front and the drum computer adding accents to the acoustic kit.
ECM quotes Jazz Forum: "Garbarek plays with magisterial power here." Reviewing the reissue in Jazz Journal in 2019, Ian Lomax wrote that the album "was, and still remains, exceptional". He heard Garbarek bringing light to Peacock's dark tone, with the bass played as a lead instrument throughout. Paul Bley once said of Peacock that he was one of those rare musicians you could count on to play better than you. This record gives the bass the space to show it.
This CD (ECM 1352) belongs to Touchstones, ECM's series of catalogue albums reissued in cardboard sleeves, begun in 2008. This edition appeared in 2019, the year of the label's 50th anniversary. Guamba was first released in 1987.
