Nightfall is the second album by Quercus, the trio of singer June Tabor, saxophonist Iain Ballamy and pianist Huw Warren. Their self-titled ECM debut won the German Record Critics' album of the year award in 2013. Here again folk song, jazz and chamber music meet on equal terms, and familiar material comes back in stark new arrangements that ask for close listening even to songs everyone knows.
The music was recorded in December 2015 at Cooper Hall in Frome, Somerset, by engineer Mike Mower, and mixed in London by Gerry O'Riordan. Ian Mann of The Jazzmann reports that it was taped at a concert, with the applause removed. Unusually for ECM, Warren and Ballamy produced the album themselves. Warren has been Tabor's arranger and accompanist for nearly three decades, and Ballamy plays tenor and soprano saxophone.
The programme opens with Auld Lang Syne, sung slowly as a song of parting rather than celebration. On Berrow Sands, collected by the Somerset folklorist Ruth Tongue, tells of a ship lost in the Bristol Channel, and its sparse words get an equally sparse setting. Songs from outside the tradition sit beside it. There is Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice It's Alright, and the standard You Don't Know What Love Is carries one of Ballamy's most expansive solos. Somewhere, from West Side Story, closes the album. Two instrumentals, Warren's pastoral Christchurch and Ballamy's ballad Emmeline, break up the vocal pieces. The Cuckoo follows the version of the Dorset singer Caroline Hughes, slowed down to bring out its pathos.
Mike Collins wrote in London Jazz News (2017) that "the most familiar of songs is like a new thing in their hands". He singled out the end of Somewhere, where Tabor's last note fades into Ballamy's tenor, and called Warren the third essential element of the trio's chemistry. John Kelman of All About Jazz praised the saxophonist for "coming so closely together with Tabor as to sound nearly, at times, as one".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2522, first released on 28 April 2017, in a jewel case with a 24-page booklet.
