Jakob Bro, Joe Lovano

CD version. Once Around The Room is a tribute to Paul Motian by two musicians who knew his music from the inside, Danish guitarist Jakob Bro and American saxophonist Joe Lovano. It is their first album as co-leaders, made with a septet of three bassists and two drummers. Rather than replaying Motian's tunes, the band works from his way of handling time and space: four originals, a collective improvisation and a single Motian piece, Drum Music.

Lovano played alongside Motian for three decades, most famously in the trio with Bill Frisell that made three albums for ECM. Bro was a member of Motian's band and made his ECM debut on the drummer's Garden of Eden (2006). The session took place in November 2021 at The Village Recording in Copenhagen, ten years after Motian's death in 2011. Two of the three bassists play double bass, the third bass guitar. Lovano plays tenor saxophone and tárogató. Thomas Vang engineered and Manfred Eicher produced. The title recalls Motian's habit of running around the Central Park reservoir, and the circle the players sat in while recording.

Lovano's As It Should Be opens the record on a twelve-tone theme over droning basses, with Bro's guitar laying down a pulse beneath the tenor. Sound Creation, credited to the whole band, is freely improvised and almost ritual in feeling, with Lovano starting on tárogató before moving to tenor. Drum Music turns fierce, giving solo and duet space to drummers Joey Baron and Jorge Rossy. Then the leaders cut loose, Bro with distorted guitar and Lovano at the top of his horn. The two Bro pieces, Song To An Old Friend and the closing Pause, return to slow melody and quiet arpeggios.

The press response was strong. In The Times, Chris Pearson noted that with so many players in unison, "what could have been confused and cacophonous instead becomes a warm bath of sound." For Mike Hobart in the Financial Times, the double rhythm section kept Motian's fluid rhythms and misty textures, while "a sharper attack and greater urgency offer something new." Stereoplay made it its jazz album of the month, and Jazzwise gave it an Editor's Choice.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2747, first released in November 2022.