Ondas is the only album the New Zealand-born pianist Mike Nock made for ECM, an acoustic trio date recorded in Oslo in November 1981. Nock had earlier helped open up new jazz with the electric group The Fourth Way at the end of the 1960s. Here he chose a slower, more inward music, five long pieces of his own built on open forms and a sombre, lyrical piano sound.
The trio is completed by Eddie Gomez on bass and Jon Christensen on drums, two players who had not worked together before. The session took place at Talent Studio, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing, and the album appeared in 1982. Talking to the critic John Shand in 2020, Nock recalled that Eicher wanted a softer, more poetic side of him than In Out and Around had shown. According to the same account the trio recorded the whole album in about two hours.
The opening Forgotten Love runs to almost sixteen minutes. It began as a pared-back version of an older Nock tune. When the band reached the end of the form, Eicher signalled them to go on, and the second pass grows in intensity. Gomez's elastic bass often acts as a second lead voice, answering the piano in long pizzicato lines. In the title track Christensen works mostly on cymbals, and his pulse is felt as a succession of waves rather than a fixed beat. Land of the Long White Cloud takes its title from the English rendering of Aotearoa, the Māori name for New Zealand.
Nock himself admitted to Shand that he would never have dared to put out such unrelieved sombreness on his own, and Eicher later counted Ondas among his favourite piano trio records. Reviewing it for AllMusic, Thom Jurek called Nock "a magician of lyrical invention". He singled out Gomez's pizzicato on Forgotten Love and Visionary, and Christensen's sparse, open cymbal work. Jurek also heard the influence of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett in Nock's voicings, built largely on minor modes.
CD, ECM 1220, first released in 1982 and reissued in 2019 in the Touchstones series. ECM began this line of catalogue reissues in card sleeves in 2008 and extended it for its fiftieth anniversary.
