Jon Christensen

Selected Recordings follows the Norwegian drummer Jon Christensen through more than two decades of sessions for ECM, from April 1974 to May 1997. None of the nine pieces comes from an album under his own name. They are taken from records led by others, and heard in sequence they show how much his drumming shaped the sound of those groups.

Eight albums are drawn on. Three belong to the European Quartet of Keith Jarrett with Jan Garbarek: Belonging (Oslo, 1974), My Song (recorded 1977, released 1978) and Personal Mountains, recorded in Tokyo in 1979 but issued only in 1989. Two tracks come from Ralph Towner's Solstice (December 1974) and one from Terje Rypdal's Waves (1977). The others are taken from the group Masqualero's Bande à Part (1985), Ketil Bjørnstad's Water Stories (1993) and the Bobo Stenson Trio's War Orphans (1997). Manfred Eicher produced the original sessions.

The disc opens with the sixteen minutes of Personal Mountains, a Jarrett theme stretched out by the full quartet. Piscean Dance is a duo with Towner's twelve-string guitar, while Per Ulv places the drums under Rypdal's electric guitar and synthesizer, with trumpet and electric bass completing the band. Christensen's own composition Tutte, barely three and a half minutes long, comes from the Masqualero album. Further on are Ornette Coleman's War Orphans, played by the Stenson trio, and Glacial Reconstruction, the opening section of Water Stories, with Rypdal again on guitar.

What links these settings is the drummer, moving between acoustic quartet jazz, a guitar-and-drums duo, electric ensembles and a piano trio. Reviewing the set for ECM Reviews in 2020, shortly after Christensen's death, Tyran Grillo wrote that "his cymbals are themselves instruments of revelry and never let go until the music stops." The same review praises his pacing on The Windup, the Jarrett piece that closes the programme.

CD in a six-panel digipak with a 24-page booklet, digitally remastered, released by ECM on 26 January 2004 (066 599-2) as :rarum XX. The :rarum series collected "Selected Recordings" of individual ECM musicians across their work for the label, and this is its twentieth volume.