Eberhard Weber

Résumé is a live album with a difference. Eberhard Weber played more than a thousand concerts as a member of the Jan Garbarek Group. Every one included an extended feature for bass alone, closer to a spontaneous composition than to a jazz bass solo. A severe stroke in 2007 ended his playing career. Here he returned to tapes of those solo sequences and reworked twelve of them into a new album with its own sense of flow.

The source recordings date from 1990 to 2007, and each track is named after the place where it was taped, from Liezen and Karlsruhe to Santiago, Bath and Grenoble. Weber added keyboard settings and treatments of his own. Two old friends also appear. Garbarek, recorded then and now, plays selje overtone flute on Bath and adds new saxophone parts to pieces such as Amsterdam. Michael DiPasqua, Weber's partner in the early 1980s Garbarek Group, plays drums and percussion on Bochum and Lazise. The album was mixed in 2011 at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France by Weber, Manfred Eicher, DiPasqua and Gérard de Haro.

Mostly we hear the sound of Weber's customised five-string electric double bass, played through a delay unit. In his liner notes he explains that he recorded his bass live and played solo improvisations over this spontaneous playback, loops that existed only for one concert and a few minutes. In concert the solos had a practical job, joining two blocks of the programme in different keys and tempi. For Résumé those transitional passages were removed and replaced, in his words, with "aphorisms, small surprises and colours with the addition of other instruments". Weber adds that even he can no longer always tell what he played on stage and what he added later.

The German magazine Jazzthing described the album as a set of poetic encounters with a master of the low notes. It recommended the record to anyone who cannot get enough of his relaxed but carefully built sound explorations. Audio heard melodic qualities that recall the years when Weber was one of the most distinctive bassists in European jazz. A second album made the same way, Encore, followed on ECM in 2015.

CD edition, ECM 2051, first released in November 2012.