Gary Burton Quartet

CD version. Seven Songs for Quartet and Chamber Orchestra places the Gary Burton Quartet inside an orchestral setting written and conducted by Michael Gibbs. It was recorded in Hamburg in December 1973 and released by ECM in 1974, early in the label's history. Gibbs drew on Messiaen and Charles Ives as much as on Miles Davis and Gil Evans, and the result still sounds fresh.

Burton plays vibraharp, with Mick Goodrick on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass and Ted Seibs on drums, joined by members of the NDR Symphony Orchestra. Manfred Eicher produced, Henning Ruete recorded the sessions and Martin Wieland mixed them. The partnership with Gibbs was not new. Burton's 1969 album Throb already included Gibbs's title piece and Swallow's Arise, Her Eyes, and both return here in fresh orchestral form. The same year as this record, Gibbs and Burton also made In the Public Interest together.

The title counts seven compositions on six tracks. The opening nine-minute suite joins Gibbs's Nocturne Vulgaire to Swallow's Arise, Her Eyes, the only piece on the album not by Gibbs. It starts from a slow swell of strings into which Burton's mallets enter gradually, and the blend of vibraphone and bowed sound stays at the centre throughout. Throb rides on Goodrick's steady strumming and Seibs's cymbals, with the orchestra adding weight rather than decoration. By Way of a Preface opens in abstract textures before giving the floor to a long Goodrick solo. Phases and Three leave room for Swallow's bass and for exchanges between vibes and guitar.

ECM's own notes say the album "set a new standard for recordings of orchestral jazz", pointing to the soloing of Goodrick, Swallow and Burton and to the care of the production. Reviewing it on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo heard a "delicate blend of mallets and bows" and called it "a dream album for admirers of both Burton and Weber". Grillo placed Gibbs's orchestral writing somewhere between the ensemble music of Eberhard Weber and that of Keith Jarrett, two other ECM names of the period.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1040, first released on 1 August 1974. It returned in January 2014 in ECM's Re:solutions series, which reissues catalogue titles of the 1970s and early 1980s remastered from the original analogue tapes.