Nicolas Masson, Colin Vallon, Patrice Moret, Lionel Friedli

Renaissance is the second ECM album by the quartet of Swiss saxophonist Nicolas Masson, released seven years after Travelers (2018). The four musicians have played together for roughly two decades, and the record shows it. Masson wrote ten of the eleven pieces, and the eleventh is a collective improvisation. Compared with the first album, the writing leaves the band more room to move.

Masson plays tenor and soprano saxophone. Beside him are pianist Colin Vallon, bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Lionel Friedli, the same line-up heard on Travelers. Masson had first come to ECM with Third Reel, a trio without bass with guitarist Roberto Pianca and drummer Emanuele Maniscalco, which recorded two albums for the label. Renaissance was recorded in November 2023 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, with Gérard de Haro as recording engineer.

The programme moves between rubato pieces and tighter, more cerebral structures. The opener, Tremolo, starts quietly over rippling piano, and the tenor line seems to search for its shape as it goes. The title track is the most angular and mathematical tune here. Tumbleweeds, the group improvisation, is the most ambient two and a half minutes on the album. At almost nine minutes Forever Gone is the longest piece, a slow soprano song that grows through the patient responses of the piano. Elsewhere there are shorter episodes, such as Moving On, a brief exchange between saxophone and bass, and the melodic Anemona.

Critics heard a band that had loosened up without losing focus. Writing in Jazz Views, Nick Lea noted that Masson "has loosened his grip on the compositional structures of the music allowing the quartet to interact more freely". On Marlbank in March 2025, Stephen Graham gave the album four stars, compared Masson's broad tone to Mark Turner's and called it "a highly elegiac quartet album". Jazz Magazine awarded it a "Choc", and in Concerto Christian Bakonyi singled out Friedli for the accents he keeps adding from the drum kit.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2846, first released in March 2025.