Night Sessions is the fourth album by The Dowland Project, the group led by the tenor John Potter that draws on both early music and improvisation. Released by ECM in 2013, it gathers music recorded years earlier, in September 2001 and January 2006, during the sessions for Care-charming Sleep (2003) and Romaria (2008). Despite the name, no Dowland is heard: the sources run from a 12th-century troubadour song to lute music printed in 1529.
The title explains much of it. After the final session for Care-charming Sleep, producer Manfred Eicher asked the group to go back into the church and record more. They had run out of music, but Potter had some medieval poems with him, and the night pieces were made in single takes. The original band has Potter, Stephen Stubbs on lute, chitarrone, baroque guitar and vihuela, and John Surman on soprano saxophone, bass clarinet and percussion. Here they are joined by Barry Guy on double bass and Maya Homburger on baroque violin. The later line-up adds a player on violin and viola. Everything was recorded at the Propstei St. Gerold.
Alongside the improvised pieces there are 'daytime' tracks, worked up, Potter notes, from small amounts of notation. Menino Jesus à Lapa is based on fragments of a Portuguese pilgrim song and Theoleptus 22 is built around Byzantine chant. The oldest compositions are Bernart de Ventadorn's love song Can vei la lauzeta mover and Fumeux fume by the 14th-century avant-gardist Solage. Stubbs frames the programme with his own solo descents and lute pieces from Dalza's Intabolatura de lauto (Venice, 1508) and Attaignant's Paris collection of 1529.
Barry Witherden gave the album five stars in BBC Music Magazine in 2013. He wrote that it "has all the virtues and delights of the previous ones", only more challenging and experimental. In Jazzwise, Robert Shore described Man in the Moon as an "engagingly out-there mixture of moodily skittering instrumental invention and declamatory vocal". Karl Lippegaus in the Süddeutsche Zeitung observed that the group cares less and less about labels such as early or new music, classical or jazz.
CD edition, ECM New Series 2018, first released in June 2013, with liner notes by John Potter.
