Joe Lovano, Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz, Michal Miskiewicz

LP version. Homage is the second ECM album by the American saxophonist Joe Lovano with the trio of the Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski, five years after Arctic Riff (2020). The earlier record leaned on lyricism. This one opens up to long collective improvisation, the kind of free-flowing interplay Lovano has pursued with his own recent trio. Five of the six pieces are his, and three of them run from eight to twelve minutes, leaving room for the music to change course along the way.

Wasilewski has played with Slawomir Kurkiewicz on double bass and Michal Miskiewicz on drums since the early 1990s, and the three first came to ECM as the rhythm section of Tomasz Stanko's quartet. The shape of Homage was formed on tour with Lovano, and a week at New York's Village Vanguard in 2023 worked as an informal rehearsal. The quartet then recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, in November 2023, with Maureen Sickler as engineer. Lovano plays tenor saxophone, the Hungarian tárogató and gongs, and at times moves to hand drums. Manfred Eicher produced the album and mixed it in Munich in October 2024.

The opener is Love in the Garden by the Polish violinist Zbigniew Seifert, recast as a rubato tenor ballad with fluid piano harmonies around the melody. Golden Horn begins on a four-note figure that recalls John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Lovano eases in on fragments before the piece sweeps into fast post-bop, with a driving solo from Wasilewski. Midway Lovano joins Miskiewicz on hand drums, then returns on tárogató. The title track moves from short melodic bursts to unaccompanied and freely collective passages, and ends on a percussion coda. Two miniatures, Giving Thanks for solo tenor and Projection, complete the programme with the long This Side - Catville.

Reviewers noted how little the studio took away from the music. Nick Lea of Jazz Views found that the quartet lost none of the spontaneity of a club set, even on the longest tracks. John Fordham in The Guardian (2025) heard Lovano "simmering all his decades of timeless tunes and exquisite passing phrases down to essences". For Sebastian Scotney at The Arts Desk, Lovano had found "the ideal context to play with a remarkable spontaneity and freedom".

This is the LP edition of ECM 2845, first released in April 2025 and also issued on CD.