Andy Sheppard Quartet

CD version. Romaria is the second album by the Andy Sheppard Quartet, and it picks up the atmosphere of Surrounded By Sea, the group's 2015 debut on ECM. The British saxophonist calls this line-up his "dream band". Here it plays seven of his own pieces and one Brazilian song, with long, unhurried saxophone lines set against the guitar drones and electronics of Eivind Aarset.

The quartet grew out of Sheppard's trio with bassist Michel Benita and drummer Sebastian Rochford, heard on Trio Libero in 2012. Aarset, a Norwegian guitarist, joined for Surrounded By Sea. Sheppard plays tenor and soprano saxophone. The album was recorded in April 2017 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, engineered by Stefano Amerio and produced by Manfred Eicher. Sheppard told London Jazz News that the band went in without a rigid plan and finished in "an intense couple of days", and that the sequencing owes a lot to Eicher.

The album opens and closes with two companion pieces, And A Day... and Forever..., slow tenor melodies over double bass and soft tom-toms. The title track is a 1970s song by Renato Teixeira that Elis Regina made famous. Sheppard's wife Sara suggested it, he had been playing it as an encore, and Eicher liked it enough to name the album after it. With Every Flower That Falls comes from a live score Sheppard wrote for a screening of Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the Bristol International Jazz Festival, newly arranged for the quartet. Aarset's sustained tones colour almost every track, and Benita and Rochford move freely in and out of conventional rhythm section roles.

Mark McKergow wrote in London Jazz News in 2018 that the title track is "no samba-bumping Latin workout but rather another superbly precise and atmospheric rendition". In Jazz Views, Chris Baber found the set "relaxed and meditative, but always controlled and sublimely compelling". Not every critic was won over: Will Layman of PopMatters heard "evocative but antiseptic atmospheres" and too little contrast between the tunes.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2577, first released on 16 February 2018.