CD version. Midwest is the third ECM album by the Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, after The Door (2008) and Skala (2011). Its eight original pieces trace an imagined journey from Hem, the tiny village where he grew up, across the sea to the plains of Dakota. Hundreds of thousands of Norwegians made that crossing in the 19th and early 20th centuries, taking their music with them. Eick brings the colours of his own folk tradition into a band shaped by American jazz.
The idea came on a long North American tour. Eick has said he was homesick until the band reached the rural Midwest, where he "suddenly felt as if I was home". To a quartet with pianist Jon Balke, bassist Mats Eilertsen and percussionist Helge Norbakken he added the violinist Gjermund Larsen. Larsen comes from a folk music family and was known to ECM listeners from Christian Wallumrød's albums. Balke and Norbakken had long worked together in the Magnetic North Orchestra and Batagraf. The album was recorded in May 2014 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
Trumpet and violin share the front line, trading lines or rising together over the rhythm section. In the title track a soft rain of cymbals and rolling piano carry a dreamlike dialogue between the two leads. Hem sets their lines in close harmony, the blend that gives the record its folk colouring. On Dakota Balke opens wide spaces while Norbakken works at the edges, and throughout the album he finds pulses that ECM likens to tribal drumming or buffalo hooves. November closes the set on a bittersweet note of departure.
In The Observer, Dave Gelly praised Eick's beautiful tone and wrote that Larsen adds "a contrasting texture and some truly exciting solos". Thomas Conrad in JazzTimes argued that this single personnel choice makes the record unique, and heard in both players "an intimacy with melancholy". Rob Adams of the Sunday Herald compared the yearning, elegiac quality of Eick's playing to that of his labelmate Tomasz Stanko, and found Balke soloing with melodic invention.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2410, first released on 20 March 2015.
