Many More Days is the second ECM album by Third Reel, a Swiss-Italian trio. Nicolas Masson plays saxophones and clarinet, Roberto Pianca guitar and Emanuele Maniscalco drums and piano. Its thirteen pieces are short, most of them under four minutes, and all three members write for the band. Each theme is treated as a starting point that can change shape in performance. The trio keeps the brevity of its 2013 debut but gives the music firmer outlines, and Maniscalco's piano now takes a larger part.
The album was recorded in August 2014 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo of Swiss radio RSI in Lugano, the room where the debut was also made. It is an ECM and RSI Rete Due co-production, with Manfred Eicher as producer and Lara Persia as engineer. Speaking to ECM Reviews, Masson recalled that the group almost never played in strict tempo on the first album. This time they wanted "the same flow but with a more defined contour". He described the auditorium as a large wooden hall built for classical music. Its detailed sound, he said, made the three of them wary of the smallest change in dynamics.
Maniscalco wrote five of the pieces, including the opening Gilberto Stimmung and Two-Part Chorale. Masson contributed six, among them the title track and White, which Tyran Grillo links to Masabumi Kikuchi's Sunrise. Pianca's two pieces are Lara's Song and Happy People. Masson hears White, Happy People and the title track as the album's turning point, from intimate, chamber-like pieces towards more expressive and lyrical ones. Throughout, Masson's tenor stays clear and unadorned, while Pianca's guitar wraps the trio in swelling sustained chords or thick drones.
Peter Bacon of The Jazz Breakfast noted how the band could "move from pensive introspection to exuberant celebration between tracks". In ECM Reviews in 2015, Grillo wrote that "if Third Reel's self-titled ECM debut was the sun, then Many More Days is its corona". Jürg Sommer (Schweiz am Sonntag) found associations with the trio of Jimmy Giuffre and Paul Bley, and with Paul Motian's trio featuring Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell. He also heard Debussy and Satie. Reviewing the album for Jazzthing, Ulrich Steinmetzger found almost every note considered and charged with meaning.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2431, first released on 15 May 2015.
