Andy Sheppard, Rita Marcotulli, Michel Benita

On Salt Catchers the English saxophonist Andy Sheppard presents a new trio without drums, with Italian pianist Rita Marcotulli and French bassist Michel Benita. He describes them as two musicians "with whom I go back quite a long time but never recorded with collectively". The album gathers eight new Sheppard originals and one tune by Carla Bley. The result is close to chamber music, built on melody and on careful listening between three players.

Sheppard's ECM story began with the quintet album Movements in Colour in 2009. It continued with Trio Libero, the quartet records Surrounded By Sea (2015) and Romaria (2018), and a trilogy in trio with Bley and Steve Swallow. Most of the new music was written during the pandemic, when he chose to write for piano rather than the guitar of his recent bands. The missing drums, he explains, stem "only in part" from having lost his drummer Seb Rochford to Patti Smith. Marcotulli makes her first appearance on the label here. Benita, he says, understands the folk and melodic side of his writing. The trio recorded in March 2025 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The title comes from the salt works near Aveiro in Portugal, where Sheppard saw photographs of salt workers in a small museum while working with the local university. On the title track Marcotulli plays inside the piano, drawing metallic murmurs from the strings beneath Sheppard's soprano, before the three close in unison. Bley's Lawns, first recorded on her 1987 album Sextet, becomes a slow, warm ballad carried by the tenor's lower register. Salgado, which means salty and nods to the photographer Sebastião Salgado, moves on understated Latin rhythms.

Reviewing the album for ECM Reviews in September 2026, Tyran Grillo heard in the drummerless format a trace of Sheppard's years with Bley. He wrote of Marcotulli that "she does not decorate the music; she alters its physics". Sheppard himself is plain about the mood of the record: "I have always been a romantic at heart."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2856, released in September 2026.