Joe Lovano, Marilyn Crispell, Carmen Castaldi, Trio Tapestry

CD version. Our Daily Bread is the third album by Joe Lovano's Trio Tapestry, a group with no bassist where melody and harmony, not a steady beat, move the music forward. It follows Trio Tapestry and Garden of Expression and takes the trio's spacious, prayer-like lyricism a step further. All eight pieces are Lovano originals written for these two partners, and the record asks for, and repays, close listening.

Lovano plays tenor saxophone, tárogató and gongs. Marilyn Crispell, a pianist equally at ease in contemporary chamber music and post-Coltrane improvising, orchestrates the pieces as they unfold. Drummer Carmen Castaldi, who has known Lovano since their teenage years in Cleveland, adds gong and temple bells to his kit and works with colour and accent more than with time. The album was recorded in May 2022 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, and produced by Manfred Eicher. Lovano wrote the liner note himself.

The opening All Twelve is built on a twelve-tone row. Crispell and Castaldi lay out its first moves quietly before the tenor enters the conversation, and the serial idea never makes the music feel dry. On Grace Notes, the longest track at almost nine minutes, Lovano switches to the Hungarian tárogató, whose reedy voice floats over cymbals that hint at a groove without ever settling into one. Halfway through the programme comes One for Charlie, an unaccompanied tenor piece of two and a half minutes dedicated to Charlie Haden, bluesy and unhurried, with every note weighed.

The reviews were warm and attentive, and several critics heard it as the trio's most openly spiritual set, with Coltrane's ballad playing as a distant reference point. In The Guardian John Fordham noted how the trio combines "three-way jazz spontaneity with 12-tone serial forms and Lovano's tenor-ballad lyricism", and the album was an Editor's Choice in Jazzwise. Writing in DownBeat, Brian Morton asked whether it needs the two earlier albums to make sense, and answered: "Heard singly, it's superb; heard as the next step in a sequence, it's even deeper and richer."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2777, first released on 5 May 2023.