Miroslav Vitous

Journey's End is the third and last ECM album by the quartet that was the main outlet for the Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is also the only one with John Taylor at the piano. With three strong writers in the band, the record moves easily between a Czech folk theme, a ballad, collective improvisation and tightly drawn chamber jazz, all of it led from the bass.

The group first recorded for ECM on First Meeting in May 1979, with John Surman on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, Jon Christensen on drums and Kenny Kirkland on piano. The same line-up made Miroslav Vitous Group in July 1980. For this third session Taylor took over the piano chair, and Surman added baritone saxophone to his reeds. The album was recorded at Talent Studio in Oslo in July 1982, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher, and it was released in 1983.

The opening U Dunaje U Prešpurka is based on a Czech folk song, a piece Vitous had already played in Prague with the Junior Trio alongside Jan Hammer. It starts from his pizzicato and unfolds slowly over more than nine minutes. Surman's Tess is a freely phrased ballad inspired by Thomas Hardy's novel. Carry On, No. 1, credited to all four players, builds a collective improvisation on Christensen's drum patterns and small ostinato figures. Vitous dedicated his own Only One to his late father, and Taylor's Windfall closes the album.

The Gramophone review quoted by ECM compared the bassist to Mingus: "Vitous is a real leader from the bass, and the music is all the stronger for it". Reviewing the 2019 reissue in Jazz Journal, Michael Tucker called it "one of the best ECM albums of the period". He praised Taylor's "lovely, shape-shifting" Windfall and found Surman's baritone on Only One "at its most expressive".

CD, ECM 1242, first released in 1983 and reissued in 2019 in the Touchstones series. ECM began this line of catalogue reissues in card sleeves in 2008 and extended it for its fiftieth anniversary.