This six-CD box collects the albums Paul Motian made as a leader for ECM between 1972 and 1984, from Conception Vessel to It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago. Motian was already in jazz history as the drummer of the Bill Evans and Paul Bley trios, but he had not thought of leading a band until ECM offered him a session under his own name. The six records follow him from that first invitation to the first records of his long-lived trio.
Conception Vessel was recorded in New York in November 1972, with Keith Jarrett on piano and flute, Charlie Haden on bass, Sam Brown on guitar, Leroy Jenkins on violin and Becky Friend on flute. Tribute followed in New York in May 1974, with Haden, Carlos Ward on alto saxophone and two guitarists. The other four albums were made at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg: Dance (1977) and Le Voyage (1979) as trios with saxophonist Charles Brackeen, Psalm (1981) with a quintet, and the trio record of July 1984. Manfred Eicher produced all six.
Most of the music is Motian's own, and in it memories of Turkish and Armenian melodies from his childhood pass through jazz, Monk's sense of dynamics and the freedom of the new music. Tribute includes Ornette Coleman's War Orphans and Haden's Song for Ché. On Dance and Le Voyage the trio with Brackeen, first with David Izenzon and then with Jean-François Jenny-Clark on bass, shapes a sound of its own, which ECM's notes call a blueprint for what came later. Guitarist Bill Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano arrive on Psalm, with Billy Drewes and Ed Schuller, and the 1984 album reduces the band to guitar, tenor saxophone and drums, the enduring trio whose birth these recordings document.
The booklet carries extensive notes by the pianist Ethan Iverson and rare historical photographs. Writing about the set for the ECM Reviews blog, Tyran Grillo called It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago "a thoroughly relaxing album and one easy to get lost in", and singled out Le Voyage as one of Motian's finest.
The box (ECM 2260-65) was released by ECM Records in 2013 in the label's Old & New Masters series, which gathers an artist's earlier ECM albums in box sets.
