Saudades is a live tribute to Tony Williams and his group Lifetime, played by Trio Beyond. Jack DeJohnette, John Scofield and Larry Goldings take up Lifetime's organ, guitar and drums format, once filled by Larry Young, John McLaughlin and Williams himself. The two discs stretch the idea well past a repertoire revival, following Williams from his early years with Miles Davis to the jazz-rock he helped invent.
DeJohnette had replaced Williams in the Davis group in 1969, when the drummer left to form Lifetime. The trio grew from his conversations with Scofield about Williams's influence on both of them, and Scofield brought in Goldings, his organist since 1993. Shortly before his death in 1997, Williams himself had asked Goldings to form a new group in the spirit of Lifetime. The concert, first billed as "Lifetime and Beyond: Celebrating Tony Williams", was recorded on 21 November 2004 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Goldings plays Hammond organ, electric piano and sampler. Manfred Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug edited and mastered the tapes at Rainbow Studio. It was Goldings's first album for ECM.
Emergency and Spectrum come from Lifetime's first album, while John Coltrane's Big Nick and Young's Allah Be Praised belong to the follow-up, Turn It Over. From the Davis years come Seven Steps To Heaven, I Fall In Love Too Easily and Williams's own Pee Wee, here a gentle waltz with pensive guitar, brushwork and churchy organ. Big Nick becomes a seventeen-minute workout in which Goldings eventually lays out, leaving Scofield alone with the drums. The opener, If, comes from Young's 1965 album Unity. The title piece and Love In Blues are collective improvisations, the second growing out of I Fall In Love Too Easily.
In DownBeat, Jim Macnie heard DeJohnette "masterfully blending muscle and grace" and summed it up as "three dudes making full connection on rich material". John Bungey of The Times found Scofield "at his bluesy best" against Goldings's versatile Hammond. The album entered the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2006 and was a Choc du mois in Jazzman.
This is the double CD on ECM Records, ECM 1972/73, first released in June 2006 and lasting almost two hours.
