Stanley Cowell

On Illusion Suite, “the charms are quiet”, as Down Beat put it, reviewing the album in 1974. “It creeps up on you and hits you in the ear in subtle ways. Things you hadn't noticed keep jumping out. This album most directly and accurately pictures [Stanley Cowell's] fresh keyboard approach”. On the album, Cowell's only recording for ECM, the pianist's trio is completed by bassist Stanley Clarke and Jimmy Hopps on drums. Together, the players fashion a wide-flung idiomatic net that puts Cowell's compositional vision first, improvisation as means for exploration but also for sculpting an unmistakable identity, a thing Cowell had never done with as much clarity prior to this session. In his liner note, accompanying the Luminessence vinyl reissue of this album, pianist and writer Ethan Iverson observes how “Cowell leaps from one idea to the next, tackling diverse genres with gusto” and calls the album “a fearless and experimental excursion that embraces multitudes.”

“With his own trio on Illusion Suite, Cowell finds a remarkable tone that, as personal as it is, set something like a template for a new modernist classicism. An inspired, imaginative, energetic improviser, Cowell digs deep into the harmonic complexities of his tunes while building mercurial melodic lines on the fly. In short, it's a trio recording that opens out prismatically into the music of the future, and its emphases and inflections are just as timely now.” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker)

Reissued as part of ECM's Luminessence series, Illusion Suite arrives in a tip-on gatefold jacket with new liner notes and an archival photograph. Recorded in 1972 and first released in 1973.