In December 1977, at the tail end of a decade he had helped to electrify, Bill Connors brought a nylon-string guitar into Oslo's Talent Studio. Three years earlier, he had walked away from Chick Corea's Return to Forever at the height of its commercial ascent, trading a 200-watt Marshall stack for the spruce-and-cedar intimacy of the classical guitar - a decision that stunned his fusion-era following and quietly redirected the course of his work. Of Mist And Melting, his second leader date for ECM and the apex of his acoustic period, gathers around him three of the most consequential improvisers in producer Manfred Eicher's orbit: Jan Garbarek on saxophones, Gary Peacock on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums. A retrospective supergroup. Peacock and DeJohnette would, six years on, form the rhythm section of Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio. Garbarek was already shaping the saxophone vocabulary that would define ECM's European sound for the next forty years.

The six compositions are Connors's own, and they move with a deliberate, almost ceremonial pacing. Melting, the eleven-and-a-half-minute opener, sets the terms: a slow unfolding of arpeggiated nylon-string figures over Peacock's economical bass and DeJohnette's brushed pulse, until Garbarek enters with that signature dynamically rich tenor - sculpted accents, tonal variety, a particular nobility of phrase. Connors plays behind the beat to a degree few guitarists ever attempt, his lines suspended a half-breath behind the rhythm section, creating a hovering tension that pulls the music into its own gravity. There is a flamenco inflection in the right hand, a Segovia-like compositional logic in the left - Face In The Water and Unending could sit beside the Spanish master's own Neblina without apology. Aubade opens onto something more abstract: a dawn-song in which the quartet drifts in and out of focus, DeJohnette's cymbals working in cells of crystalline detail while Peacock's bass speaks with the discretion of a chamber instrument.

What sets the record apart from the broader ECM acoustic-guitar idiom of the era is its refusal of the pastoral. No saccharine softness here. The mood is reflective but tense, poised between the lyrical and the unresolved. Michael Tucker in Jazz Journal described the album as a meeting of "hot" and "cool" jazz "combined so strikingly", and that polarity is the animating principle: Connors's predominantly cool linearity against DeJohnette's rolling and tumbling, poetic contemplation pressed against rhythmic vitality, each refusing to dissolve into the other. Listening back in 2025, Connors himself sounded faintly amazed at his younger self - "I forgot how much time I had dedicated to playing this type of guitar."

Reissued now as part of ECM's Luminessence series, Of Mist And Melting returns in a tip-on gatefold jacket with new liner notes and previously unseen photographs from the archive. Jan Erik Kongshaug's original Talent Studio engineering - the unmistakable bloom of nylon strings caught in three-dimensional space - is the kind of recording the format was made for. A subtle tour de force then, as Billboard called it at its release. A subtle tour de force still. Essential for anyone tracing the deeper currents of ECM's first decade.