Wolfgang Muthspiel, Ambrose Akinmusire, Brad Mehldau, Larry Grenadier, Brian Blade

Rising Grace is the second ECM album led by the Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, and the one where his trio became a quintet. To the rhythm section of Larry Grenadier and Brian Blade, already heard on his 2014 leader debut Driftwood, he added Brad Mehldau on piano and Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet. Five players with strong solo voices spend most of the record listening to each other, and the music that comes out is lyrical, unhurried and built around Muthspiel's songlike writing.

The session took place in January and February 2016 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, with Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Muthspiel moves between electric guitar and a classically tinged acoustic instrument. He wrote nine of the ten pieces. The exception is Wolfgang's Waltz, a melodious, gently swinging tune that Mehldau composed especially for the album.

The title track opens the set with a flowing theme. Akinmusire's long, polished notes glide over Muthspiel's arpeggios and Mehldau's chords while bass and drums keep a soft, steady pulse. Intensive Care, the longest piece at just over ten minutes, develops slowly, the guitarist's nylon-string phrases answered by the piano. Den Wheeler, Den Kenny is a warm homage to the late trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, whose album Gnu High has long been a reference for Muthspiel, and Akinmusire plays it with slow, elegiac lines. At the other end of the record, Boogaloo moves on a broken, moody groove with distorted guitar.

Critics heard a band without hierarchy. Writing in DownBeat, which gave the album five stars, Yoshi Kato described "a five-way interplay on a tranquil, sometimes subtly shimmering canvas." Thomas Conrad made it an Editor's Pick in JazzTimes and observed that "a band with world-class solo firepower has made an album without solos." In The Guardian, John Fordham picked up echoes of Wheeler, of the classical guitar sound of Ralph Towner and of the quick wit of the mid-1960s Miles Davis group.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2515, first released on 28 October 2016.