Tomasz Stańko Quartet

Lontano is the third ECM album by the Polish quartet of trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, and the one where the group opens most fully to free playing. Long collective improvisations sit beside dark, slow ballads and two pieces from Stańko's own past, in a record that moved the band's sound a step further from its first two albums.

Pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michał Miśkiewicz were already a working trio, and in 1995 they had recorded their own tribute to Krzysztof Komeda. Soul of Things and Suspended Night were recorded in Oslo. For Lontano the quartet moved to Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, near Avignon, in November 2005, with engineer Gérard de Haro and producer Manfred Eicher. They arrived straight from a long tour of Japan, Korea and Australia, and Stańko has said the road helped push the music somewhere new.

The three parts of the title piece, each between twelve and fifteen minutes, are credited to all four players and were made up in the studio. They range from free outbursts to long streams of melody, often as a dialogue between the trumpet and Wasilewski's open piano. Kattorna is by Komeda, whose group Stańko played in, and it was first recorded on Astigmatic in 1965. Here Stańko scatters runs of notes over Wasilewski's jabbing piano. The closing Tale first appeared on Balladyna, Stańko's ECM debut of 1975, and was revived at Eicher's suggestion. Between these come new ballads such as Song for Ania and Sweet Thing, in the slow, soulful vein that had become a hallmark of Stańko's music.

Richard Lehnert of Stereophile placed it with the two earlier records made with "this almost telepathic trio". As with those, he wrote, "it is the best thing Tomasz Stanko has done." In The Absolute Sound, Derk Richardson compared the rhythm section's rapport with Stańko to that of Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams with Miles Davis. The album was placed on the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2006. It followed a period of wide recognition for the group: Stańko won the first European Jazz Prize in 2002, and Suspended Night took Australia's Bell Award for best jazz album in 2005.

This is the original CD edition, ECM 1980, released in August 2006.