Colin Vallon, Patrice Moret, Julian Sartorius

Samares is the third ECM album by the Swiss trio of pianist Colin Vallon, after Le Vent (2014) and Danse (2017). The lyricism and melancholy of Vallon's writing are intact, as is the trio's understated three-way interplay, but the sound has moved on. Vallon now uses electronics to bend the pitch of the piano, and the music reaches further in dynamics, from near silence to dense, insistent build-ups.

Vallon, born in Lausanne in 1980, wrote all nine pieces. With him are double bassist Patrice Moret, his partner for some twenty years, and drummer Julian Sartorius, who joined the group more than a decade ago. The album was recorded in June and July 2023 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, and produced by Manfred Eicher. The French titles point to plants and the ground: Racine (root), Ronce (bramble), Souche (stump), Brin (blade of grass). Samares are the winged seeds that spin down from maple trees.

Hooks are assembled patiently, some built on melody, some on harmony, some on a beat. Racine opens with brushed drums and prepared piano before moving to the open keyboard, as Sartorius adds bowed cymbals and small textures. Mars sets a lush, tuneful line over a steady, discreet pulse, and its rhythmic twists around simple piano triads recall art-rock as much as jazz. The title track works the other way, with a stop-start melody that keeps the listener slightly off balance. Prepared piano returns sparingly elsewhere, with woodblocks altering the attack of the hammers, so that the source of a sound is not always easy to place.

Reviewers heard both the continuity and the change. In The Big Takeover, Michael Toland called it "his most diverse, enigmatic, and moody record to date". Mike Gates in UK Vibe gave it five stars and heard "a sense of 'oneness'" running through the album. Several writers compared Vallon's harmonic world to Bill Evans on one side and Radiohead's slow crescendos on the other, and Ivo Franchi in Musica Jazz described him less as a soloist than as the director of a collective sound.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2809, first released on 15 November 2024.