CD version. Return from the Stars is the second ECM album by Mark Turner's quartet, a group without piano or guitar in which his tenor saxophone shares the front line with trumpet. The title comes from Stanisław Lem's 1961 science fiction novel about an astronaut who returns to a changed, risk-averse Earth. Turner had appeared on ECM with the Billy Hart Quartet, with the trio Fly and in a duo with Ethan Iverson, but this was his first quartet record since Lathe of Heaven in 2014.
The trumpeter is Jason Palmer, who met Turner as a fellow sideman about a decade earlier and had him on four of his own albums. Bassist Joe Martin has played with Turner in different settings since 1995 and is the only holdover from Lathe of Heaven, where the trumpeter was Avishai Cohen. Drummer Jonathan Pinson completes the group, and for him and Palmer this was a first ECM session. The album was recorded in November 2019 at Sear Sound in New York, mixed in September 2021 at Studios La Buissonne and produced by Manfred Eicher.
All eight pieces are Turner's. He writes out most of the horn parts, while bass and drums receive only a feel, a few hits and some changes of time, and find their own way from there. Without a chordal instrument the harmony stays open, and tenor and trumpet move between unison lines and counterpoint. On the title track the two horns state the theme together before Martin's bass briefly takes the lead. Waste Land is a ballad introduced by the tenor, and the twelve-minute Unacceptable grows into an extended dialogue between the horns.
Critics singled out the partnership at the front. In the Observer, Dave Gelly called the interplay between Turner and Palmer "quite superb, two melodic lines moving between harmony and dissonance, yet always in touch". John Fordham placed the record in Turner's "quietly chamber-musical" world and found it "close to perfect" in Jazzwise. Writing in DownBeat in May 2022, Ed Enright read the album through the balance of freedom and responsibility that Turner asks of his players.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2684, first released on 25 March 2022.
