Stefano Battaglia Trio

In The Morning is the sixth ECM album by the Italian pianist Stefano Battaglia, and the third by his trio with Salvatore Maiore and Roberto Dani. Recorded live in Turin in April 2014, it is devoted to the American composer Alec Wilder (1907-1980), whose work ran from popular songs to chamber music, operas and art songs. Battaglia reads him through melody, letting seven pieces open into long, patient trio improvisations.

The concert took place on 28 April 2014 at the Teatro Vittoria in Torino, within the Torino Jazz Festival. Battaglia arranged all the material, Stefano Amerio engineered the recording and Manfred Eicher produced the album. Battaglia first played Wilder in the early 1990s, performing his sonatas for oboe and piano and for horn and piano, after knowing songs like Moon and Sand through Keith Jarrett's versions. He describes Dani's drums as tuned very openly, with a deep symphonic bass drum, and says this pushed him towards open piano voicings built on seconds, fourths and empty fifths.

Most of the set comes from what Battaglia calls the "Art Songs" room of Wilder's output, settings of poems by Christina Rossetti, W. B. Yeats and Carl Sandburg, among others. The title track begins with an almost naive pastoral theme that settles into a stately vamp. Moon and Sand is the most harmonically defined moment, its haunting tune repeated until it turns into a slow, trance-like cycle. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the longest performance at nearly sixteen minutes, travels from abstraction to plainly stated melody, with an extended bass passage at its centre. Chick Lorimer, Wilder's Sandburg setting, closes the concert as a wordless and freer piece with a final rush of momentum.

Writing in London Jazz News in 2015, Mike Collins heard a trio "alert to every nod, rustle, hesitation and shimmer conjured by one of the partners". For Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews, Battaglia, Maiore and Dani had "redefined the capabilities of the jazz trio by going inward". Tim Stenhouse in UK Vibe placed Battaglia among the leading piano trio leaders in Europe and praised the recorded sound. Battaglia himself sets the group in a line that includes the trios of Jimmy Giuffre, Bill Evans and Paul Bley, and Jarrett's with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette. The album followed The River of Anyder and Songways, the trio's earlier ECM records.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2429, first released on 28 August 2015.