Michael Mantler

Review (1968-2000) is the first anthology of the work of Michael Mantler, the Austrian trumpeter and composer, with the pieces chosen by Mantler himself. Its 22 tracks last about 75 minutes and draw on more than thirty years of recordings for JCOA, WATT and ECM. Heard in order, they trace a path from free jazz orchestras through literary song cycles to chamber and symphonic writing.

Mantler studied trumpet and musicology in Vienna, moved to Boston in 1962 and within two years was at the centre of new jazz in New York. With Carla Bley he founded the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, and the oldest piece here, Preview from 1968, has Pharoah Sanders soloing explosively over Mantler's orchestral frame. With the WATT label he began to bring singers from outside jazz into his work. Jack Bruce, Robert Wyatt and Marianne Faithfull recur across the decades, singing words by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Gorey and Paul Auster. The original sessions were produced by Mantler or by Bley.

The sequence runs backwards in time. It opens and closes with songs from Hide and Seek (2000), Mantler's setting of a short play by Auster, and in between it works its way back towards 1968. The Sinking Spell, from The Hapless Child (1975/76), gives Gorey's darkly comic verse to Wyatt's deadpan voice, with Bley in the band. Number Six, from No Answer (1973), has Bruce singing lines from Beckett's How It Is. The excerpt from 13, recorded in 1975 for large orchestra with some freedom of interpretation but no improvisation, appears on CD here for the first time. The 1990s are covered too. One piece comes from Folly Seeing All This, built around a string quartet, and one from Cerco un paese innocente, with poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti sung in Italian.

Reviewing the set in The Guardian, John L Walters called it "a startling reminder of just how inventive Mantler is, working confidently across contemporary composition, jazz, improv and progressive rock". In The Times, John Bungey wrote of "difficult" music that is easy on the ear. He also noted the motley collaborators that Mantler's mix of modern European music and jazz has always attracted. In France, Jazzmagazine gave it its Disque d'émoi.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1813, released on 7 November 2006, with liner notes by Mantler.