Mathias Eick

CD version. Ravensburg is the fourth ECM album as leader by Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, and a portrait of the people closest to him. Its eight pieces carry plain titles such as Family, Children, Parents and For My Grandmothers. Eick says they cover the emotional situations of the stage where we spend most of our time, which is home. The trumpet and violin pairing he began on Midwest moves here to the centre of a sextet.

The title comes from the Swabian town where one of Eick's grandmothers was born; the working title had been Family, until he found how many albums already used it. The new violinist is Håkon Aase, who was 22 when he joined and whom Eick hears as a bridge between folk, jazz and contemporary improvisation. Pianist Andreas Ulvo and electric bassist Audun Erlien come from Eick's touring band, and two drummers, Torstein Lofthus and Helge Andreas Norbakken, share the rhythm. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in June 2017, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Eick gave the drummers no instructions, aiming for a sound that was more three-dimensional rather than bigger, and their exchanges mirror his own call and response with Aase. Family opens in layers: a delicate piano figure, a violin line, then the trumpet. Children runs over a shuffle beat, with the violin playing around the trumpet. On August Eick also sings wordless lines, something he started doing at home with his children, since he thinks of the trumpet as an extension of the voice. The same piece has the album's only piano solo, played by Ulvo almost entirely with one hand.

In JazzTimes in 2018, Thomas Conrad described Eick's trumpet lines as "calls of hope and longing, streaks of light in the darkness". Jon Turney, writing in London Jazz News, heard Aase's violin dance and dive "around the trumpet like a good-humoured cousin teasing a sober-sided elder". Reviewers also noted a more contemporary feel than the folk-tinged Midwest, with room for jazz-rock drive as well as hymn-like pieces.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2584, released on 2 March 2018.