Jack DeJohnette

Pictures is one of the quietest records in the early ECM catalogue of Jack DeJohnette. Across six numbered pieces the drummer plays drums, piano and organ, alone on three of them and in duo with guitarist John Abercrombie on the other three. Recorded in Oslo in February 1976 and released in 1977, it presents DeJohnette as composer and sound colourist rather than bandleader.

By then DeJohnette had played with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis, and he had trained as a pianist before taking up the drums. Abercrombie was a close partner. The two had recorded his album Timeless in 1974 and formed the trio Gateway with Dave Holland, whose first ECM album appeared in 1975. Here Abercrombie plays electric and acoustic guitars on Picture 3, Picture 4 and Picture 5, and he co-wrote Picture 3. The session took place at Talent Studio with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. In the same month DeJohnette also recorded Untitled in Oslo with his band Directions.

The music is spare and unhurried. Picture 1 starts from a steady drum pattern that widens with each new turn, until an organ rises underneath and changes its colour. Picture 2 is a piece for toms and cymbals, built on the pitches of the drums themselves. In the three duo pieces Abercrombie moves between wandering lines and more forceful passages, and Picture 5 sets his acoustic guitar against the kit. The closing Picture 6, the longest track, opens with a restrained piano introduction that swells into gongs before a melody comes through.

The album has always sat in the shadow of DeJohnette's group records and of Gateway, and jazz guides have usually rated it modestly. Later listeners have valued its plainness. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo described it as "stripped-down music-making for its own sake, offered up to the listener with humility and respect". Of the final piano piece he wrote, "It is a Keith Jarrett moment if there ever was one."

This is the CD edition of ECM 1079 (catalogue 519 284-2), first released on LP in 1977.