Barre Phillips

Mountainscapes is the first ECM album credited to bassist Barre Phillips alone, after his 1971 duo record with Dave Holland, Music From Two Basses. It sets two kinds of music side by side. One is the fierce, high-energy playing of the trio Phillips shared with John Surman and Stu Martin. The other is a set of spacious, impressionistic pieces first created for the dancers of choreographer Carolyn Carlson. Synthesizers run through both, played by three of the four musicians.

Phillips plays double bass. Surman plays baritone and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet and synthesizer, Martin drums and synthesizer, and Dieter Feichtner synthesizer. Phillips, Surman and Martin had worked together as The Trio, which recorded for the Dawn label in 1970 and 1971. John Abercrombie dropped by the studio and joined in on the last track. The album was recorded in March 1976 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, produced by Manfred Eicher with Martin Wieland as engineer. All eight pieces are credited jointly to Phillips, Feichtner, Surman and Martin.

The eight parts are numbered rather than titled, and they move between near-silence and full attack. Mountainscape I starts at the edge of hearing before breaking into a crackling free groove, with Surman's soprano rising over bass and electronics. Mountainscape II, under three minutes, is the most withdrawn and enigmatic of the set. Later sections, among them Mountainscape V and VII, grow out of synthesizer arpeggios, with bass and saxophone following them closely. In Mountainscape VIII Abercrombie's electric guitar is pushed by the saxophone towards a feverish peak, before the piece settles down again.

ECM's own note points to the careful balance between acoustic instruments and electronics in the production. In a review quoted by ECM, Melody Maker called the record "vast, awesome and glorious" and "a starting point for the shape of jazz to come". Phillips went on to record several more albums for ECM over the following decades, among them Journal Violone II and Music By..., both in the early 1980s.

This CD (ECM 1076) belongs to the 2019 Touchstones series, 50 classic ECM albums reissued in cardboard gatefold sleeves for the label's 50th anniversary. The album was first released in 1976.