Many Have No Speech is a cycle of twenty-seven short songs by Michael Mantler on poems by Samuel Beckett, Philippe Soupault and Ernst Meister, sung in English, French and German. Three voices from outside jazz carry the texts: Jack Bruce, Marianne Faithfull and Robert Wyatt. Released in 1988, it was the last album Mantler made for WATT, the label he ran with Carla Bley, before his records began to appear on ECM itself.
The orchestral music was recorded in May 1987 at Danish Radio in Copenhagen, played by the Danish Concert Radio Orchestra, a full ensemble with harp, piano, vibraphone and chimes. The rest followed between May and December at West 3 Recording Studios in London, Grog Kill Studio in Willow, New York, and Newbury Sound in Boston. In those sessions Mantler added his trumpet and Rick Fenn his guitar. Mantler produced the album and mixed it at Grog Kill in January 1988. Bruce sings the Meister poems and two Beckett texts, Faithfull most of the Beckett and two Soupault pieces, Wyatt the other three Soupault poems.
Mantler's trumpet opens the record alone in a forty-second Introduction. From there most songs are miniatures: several Beckett fragments, such as Rien Nul and Son ombre, last about twenty seconds, so each line arrives and is gone before it settles. The longer pieces stand out by contrast. Bruce sings Beckett's Something There over three and a half minutes, and Faithfull's Comrade, on a Soupault poem in English, runs past four. Wyatt's three Soupault settings, Tant de temps, A l'abattoir and Prisonniers, come next in length. The cycle closes with Meister's Viele haben keine Sprache, the poem that gives the album its title.
ECM's own notes for the 2006 anthology Review (1968-2000) describe the album as the point where Mantler intensified his work with text and with language. They also present Faithfull as a third voice beside Bruce and Wyatt, both earlier collaborators. That anthology includes PSS, an excerpt from Comrade and A l'abattoir, one piece for each singer. Writing on the blog Between Sound and Space in 2020, Tyran Grillo called Faithfull's reading of Imagine "gut-wrenching" and summed up the record: "This is not background music. It's foreground music."
This CD carries the WATT catalogue number WATT/19 (ECM 835 580-2). The album was first released on 30 May 1988.
