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

LP version. Neighbourhood is the first album Manu Katché made as a leader for ECM. The French drummer, born in Paris in 1958, was best known for his work with Peter Gabriel and Sting. Here he wrote all ten pieces and gave them to Jan Garbarek, Tomasz Stanko and Stanko's young Polish rhythm section. The result is a set of melodic, unhurried chamber jazz that rests on a drummer's sense of groove rather than on drum solos.

The band was assembled with producer Manfred Eicher, and it was less of a first meeting than it looks. Katché had been playing in Garbarek's group. Stanko, pianist Marcin Wasilewski and bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz made up three quarters of the trumpeter's own quartet. Garbarek plays tenor saxophone. The album was recorded in March and November 2004 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer, and is dedicated to the memory of Michel Petrucciani.

Katché's tunes have little harmonic movement and leave the soloists space. On Number One a piano groove carries Garbarek, whose tone gains a rasp as he floats over it. Take Off and Land sets a sharp horn figure against an off-kilter funk pattern in which the drums carry the melody. Miles Away salutes Miles Davis on the feel and bass line of All Blues, and the closing Rose is left almost entirely to Wasilewski's piano. Throughout, Katché keeps to memorable patterns that he varies almost imperceptibly, while Stanko and Garbarek play with more fire than their usual lyricism suggests.

The album took the annual prize of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and was a Jazz Choice in BBC Music Magazine and record of the month in the Italian Musica Jazz. In The Guardian John L Walters described Katché as "the kind of drummer who can't not groove". In The Irish Times (2005) Ray Comiskey called the rhythm section "a marriage of true minds with no impediments". Two years later Katché returned with Playground, keeping Wasilewski and Kurkiewicz and bringing in younger horn players.

LP edition of ECM 1896, issued on vinyl in June 2019. The album first appeared on CD in September 2005.