Giovanni Guidi, Gianluca Petrella, Louis Sclavis, Gerald Cleaver

Ida Lupino is a largely improvised quartet record built on the partnership of two Italian musicians from Enrico Rava's band, pianist Giovanni Guidi and trombonist Gianluca Petrella. Manfred Eicher paired them with French clarinettist Louis Sclavis and American drummer Gerald Cleaver. The result is a bassless group moving between open, lyrical free playing and a few tunes with a firm melodic core.

Guidi and Petrella had worked together in Rava's group, where they appear on the 2011 ECM album Tribe, and had kept playing as a duo that regularly invited guests. The Italians already knew Cleaver, while Sclavis met the others only at the sessions. The album was recorded in February 2015 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Eicher producing. Guidi called the producer the group's fifth musician.

Most of the fourteen pieces are credited to the players, as a duo, a trio with Cleaver or the full quartet. The opener, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, sets out the piano and trombone dialogue that returns in the nearly ten-minute Gato!. That piece builds slowly, peaks with a trombone shout and ends on a quiet piano melody. Its title nods to Gato Barbieri. Two pieces come from outside. Ida Lupino, the 1964 tune by Carla Bley, marks her 80th year and honours Paul Bley, who made it widely known and strongly influenced Guidi. Per i morti di Reggio Emilia is the 1960 protest song by Fausto Amodei, here a slow, warm reading led by the growling trombone. Sclavis appears on roughly half the tracks, on clarinet and bass clarinet, and opens the title piece with its melody.

Without a bass, the rhythm still holds. Cleaver, often on mallets, keeps a steady pulse, and Petrella's trombone covers the low register when needed. Reviewing it for All About Jazz, Mark Sullivan called it "another improvisational ECM triumph" and observed that the open approach brought out the best in the players. In Jazzwise, Robert Shore found the set "gorgeously played, and no less beautifully captured" by Eicher. Peter Slavid of London Jazz News (2016) heard the playing as tasteful and a little restrained, and the album as a record that grows with each listen.

CD edition, ECM 2462, released on 2 September 2016.