Jorge Rossy, Robert Landfermann, Jeff Ballard

Puerta is the first ECM album as a leader by Jorge Rossy, the Spanish musician best known as the drummer of Brad Mehldau's original trio for more than ten years. Here he plays vibraphone and marimba, leading a trio with Robert Landfermann on double bass and Jeff Ballard on drums. Nine of the ten pieces are his own, and the set shows him as a composer with a strong melodic voice as much as an improviser.

Rossy was born in Barcelona and had played trumpet and piano as well as drums before turning to the vibraphone, first in larger groups. Puerta is his third album on the instrument. Ballard, now Mehldau's drummer, has known him since the New York scene of the early 1990s. Both he and Landfermann, a German bassist Rossy met through Pablo Held's trio, had played in Rossy's Vibes Quintet. This was the first time the three worked as a trio. They recorded at Jazz Campus Basel, where Rossy and Ballard teach, in September 2020, with Daniel Dettwiler as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

Rossy plays few notes and leaves a lot of air around them, an approach he links to his early years on trumpet. The opening Post-Catholic Waltz and Maybe Tuesday swing lightly, while on Taínos his marimba lines become a loose exchange with bass and drums rather than a fixed groove. The title track, Spanish for door, was written in a London hotel shortly before one of his last concerts with Mehldau. It is the most melancholy piece here, sparse and reflective. Cargols is by the saxophonist Chris Cheek, and Adiós closes the album as a quiet tango.

Several reviewers heard echoes of the Modern Jazz Quartet in the trio's chamber-like balance. Selwyn Harris in Jazzwise praised "the intimate three-way dialogue and the enigmatic soundworld it creates", and found in it "an after-hours feel perfect for late night listening". In London Jazz News, Graham Spry noted that each member of the trio plays on equal footing. Peter Rüedi in Die Weltwoche compared the music to the finest of Alexander Calder's mobiles.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2661, first released on 5 November 2021.