Steve Swallow

Home is the album on which bassist Steve Swallow set ten poems by Robert Creeley to music, sung by Sheila Jordan with a band of five. Recorded in New York in September 1979 and released by ECM in 1980, it began a bond with Creeley's verse that Swallow kept returning to for decades. According to ECM, Creeley supported the project and was especially fond of Jordan's singing.

By 1979 Swallow had been through a string of projects with Gary Burton and Carla Bley, and here he wrote all the music himself. He plays electric bass and leads a sextet with Steve Kuhn on piano, David Liebman on tenor and soprano saxophones, Lyle Mays on synthesizer and Bob Moses on drums. The session took place at Columbia Recording Studios, with David Baker as recording engineer and Martin Wieland mixing. Manfred Eicher produced. Kuhn, Jordan and Moses had also recorded Playground for the label, an album issued under Kuhn's name with Harvie Swartz on bass.

Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews describes Creeley's tender colloquialism as Swallow's sounding board throughout. Derek Ansell of Jazz Journal heard Jordan as a seventh instrument as much as a singer, her lines blended into the ensemble. In Colors Kuhn's piano solo sets the mood and dominates the track. In In the Fall rumbling drums and thick piano chords lead to a stark tenor solo that opens into free playing before Jordan returns. Grillo hears the closing Midnight set quotations of Three Blind Mice against a haunting drone.

Reviewing the CD in Jazz Journal in February 1993, Ansell found that "Swallow's compositions complement the poems beautifully and he is served splendidly by his cohorts." Grillo, writing in 2011, called it "simply infectious music, smooth and tessellated, with not a single false step to be noted." Opinion was not unanimous. In the Village Voice in 2007, Francis Davis wrote that Home and a later Steve Lacy project had miscalculated in trying to turn Creeley into song. Creeley himself went on to work with Swallow on later albums, among them So There.

This CD is the 2019 Touchstones reissue of ECM 1160, first released in 1980. Touchstones is ECM's series of reissues of classic catalogue albums.