Imaginary Friends is the third ECM album by trumpeter Ralph Alessi, and the first after two quartet records, Baida (2013) and Quiver (2016), to feature his working quintet. The group, which has often played as This Against That over a decade and a half, had not recorded since 2010. Nine Alessi compositions, several running past eight minutes, move between lyrical writing, post-bop drive and freer, more abstract passages.
Alessi's front-line partner is saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, on tenor and sopranino, a friend since they studied together at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1980s. Pianist Andy Milne, who played alongside Alessi in Steve Coleman's band in the mid-1990s, and drummer Mark Ferber make their ECM debuts. Bassist Drew Gress was already on Baida and Quiver. The quintet went into Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in May 2018, after more than a dozen concerts across Europe. Nicolas Baillard engineered and Manfred Eicher produced.
The opener Iram Issela takes its title from the name of Alessi's young daughter spelled backwards. Its melody widens slowly until Coltrane takes a solo that, Alessi says, brought tears to his eyes. In Oxide, a ballad, Milne plays partly on prepared piano strings, and the horns are bent toward the sound of the human voice. Melee, the longest piece at over ten minutes, is built on an off-meter melody, while Fun Room lets Milne groove. On the title track Alessi and Coltrane solo together, a passage the trumpeter remembers as an especially good moment in the studio. The album ends with Good Boy, a brief duet for trumpet and piano.
In The Guardian, John Fordham called it Alessi's "best album yet for ECM", with "poignant, playful original compositions and gracefully probing improv". Matt Collar of AllMusic placed Alessi as an improviser in the line of Kenny Wheeler, making music that knows the tradition without leaning on it. Writing for the Free Jazz Collective in June 2019, Troy Dostert heard "an emotionally wrenching solo" from Coltrane on Iram Issela. He also found the whole a little less than the sum of its strong parts.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2629, released on 1 February 2019.
