Peter Erskine, Palle Danielsson, John Taylor

Juni is the fourth and last ECM album by the trio of the drummer Peter Erskine, the British pianist John Taylor and the Swedish bassist Palle Danielsson. A piano trio led by a drummer who had come up through Stan Kenton's big band and Weather Report was not what many listeners expected. The group turned that history around, building its music on space, quiet dynamics and what Erskine called the "underside of music-making".

The album was recorded in July 1997 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer, and released by ECM in 1999. Erskine had first thought of a group with Taylor in the mid-1980s, when, as a member of John Abercrombie's trio, he played opposite Taylor's band Azimuth in a New York club. They then worked side by side in Kenny Wheeler's big band and quintet. Erskine's one instruction to the others, as he told ECM, was to take the music at times to a level that brings listeners "to the edge of their seats, straining to hear". Taylor is the principal composer, but all three contribute pieces.

Erskine's Twelve is built on a twelve-tone melody, and it gave the album its title: Juni is the Japanese word for twelve, not the German for June. Wheeler's For Jan, written for a relative rather than for Jan Garbarek, comes from the trumpeter's big band book. It opens with a free drum solo before it begins to swing. Taylor's Windfall was once in the repertoire of the Miroslav Vitous Group, while Danielsson's melancholy Siri is one of the most melodic pieces here. Taylor's Prelude No. 2 opens the record at its most abstract.

The Ottawa Citizen wrote that "if such a thing as virtuosic understatement is possible, Peter Erskine's band makes it real". Billboard heard the introspective spirit of Bill Evans in the trio and a record "of shimmering, poetic beauty". The four trio albums were later collected in the box As It Was. Reviewing it for Green Man Review, Gary Whitehouse judged Juni the most abstract of the four, reflecting the direction Taylor was then taking as a composer.

This CD is the 2019 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings catalogue albums back into print in card packaging. Juni was first released in 1999 as ECM 1657.