Manu Katché, Tomasz Stańko, Jan Garbarek, Marcin Wasilewski, Slawomir Kurkiewicz

CD version. Neighbourhood is the first album Manu Katché recorded as a leader for ECM, ten pieces all written by him. Producer Manfred Eicher assembled the band, bringing the French drummer together with Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko. Two of Stańko's young associates, pianist Marcin Wasilewski and bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz, complete a quintet that plays as if it had worked together for years. Some of its members had.

Katché became known in the mid-1980s as a pop drummer for Peter Gabriel, Sting and Joni Mitchell. Eicher heard him on Robbie Robertson's untitled album for Geffen, and in 1989 Katché played with Garbarek at ECM's twentieth anniversary concerts in Paris. He then toured with the Jan Garbarek Group and recorded with it, from I Took Up the Runes to In Praise of Dreams. Wasilewski and Kurkiewicz came from Stańko's quartet. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in March and November 2004, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer, and is dedicated to the memory of Michel Petrucciani.

Garbarek once called Katché "pattern oriented", and the record bears it out. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, Manfred Papst observed that the leader stays back as a soloist, laying down memorable patterns that he varies almost imperceptibly. On the opening November 99, as John L Walters noted in The Guardian, the drums lock in closely with piano and double bass. Papst also heard Garbarek improvising more expressively than usual. In his account Stańko breaks his lyrical melancholy with more heated statements, while the music as a whole keeps a calm, open tone.

The album received the Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, was a Jazz Choice in BBC Music Magazine, and a Disque d'émoi of the year in Jazz Magazine. In The Times, John Bungey wrote: "Ruminative, soulful and always melodic, this is cool jazz with a fiery heart." Walters called it "a thoughtful, feelgood jazz album that harks back to the traditions of modern jazz while remaining contemporary", and credited Katché's inventive drumming for that balance.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1896, first released in September 2005.