Miroslav Vitous, Michel Portal, Jack DeJohnette

LP version. Mountain Call is the first album in a decade by the Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous as a leader on ECM, and something of a self-portrait. Across eighteen short tracks it gathers free duets, small-group jazz, orchestral writing and his long work with sampled orchestras. It also holds some of the last recordings of two old partners. The French clarinettist Michel Portal and the drummer Jack DeJohnette both died shortly before its release in March 2026.

Vitous, a founding member of Weather Report, first came to ECM in the late 1970s in a trio with Terje Rypdal and DeJohnette. He recorded Mountain Call himself at his Universal Syncopations studio, at several sessions between 2003 and 2010, and produced it with Manfred Eicher. Portal plays clarinet and bass clarinet. The later suites bring in Esperanza Spalding on voice and Bob Mintzer on bass clarinet, with Gary Campbell, Gerald Cleaver and members of the Czech National Symphony Orchestra.

The album opens and closes with duets for bass and clarinet, most of them improvised and under two minutes. In pieces such as New Energy and Second Touch Portal moves between graceful swoops, plaintive questions and staccato punctuation, over Vitous's muscular plucked runs. ECM ranks these duets with his strongest improvising since Atmos, his duo album with Jan Garbarek. The closing title track sets his dark bass clarinet against Vitous's dramatic arco playing. Between them, Tribal Dance and Epilog revive the old bass and drums partnership, the second framed by big orchestral chords from Vitous's samples. In the five-part Rhapsody Spalding sings Vitous's own lyrics, her first appearance on the label.

Critics read the record as a summing up. John Fordham in The Guardian (2026) wrote that the eight duo tracks with Portal "are worth the album alone". Roger Farbey in Jazz Journal wrote that "at times it is nearer to the contemporary classical output of say, Bartok or Ligeti", fused with improvisation. For Ferruccio Martinotti of the Free Jazz Collective, the opening and closing duos are the freest moments of Vitous's career. Thom Jurek on AllMusic heard a loose compendium at first, then a broad overview of Vitous as composer, instrumentalist and improviser.

LP edition, ECM 2673, released together with the CD on 27 March 2026.