Fly, Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, Jeff Ballard

Sky & Country is the ECM debut of Fly, the cooperative trio of saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard. It is a saxophone trio with no piano or guitar and no leader, and its nine pieces are written so that melody, bass line and drum part can trade places. Recorded in New York in 2008, it was the group's second album.

Ballard called the group into existence in the mid-1990s. It worked as the Jeff Ballard Trio before taking the name Fly for its first album in 2004, and Ballard and Grenadier had played together since the early 1990s. All three write for the band: Turner contributes four pieces, Ballard three and Grenadier two. Turner, on tenor and soprano saxophone, describes the method in ECM's notes: "Sometimes it's the saxophone carrying the melody. Other times it's the bass or drums." The sessions took place at Avatar Studios in New York in February 2008, with James Farber engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.

Ballard's Lady B opens the record with a slippery groove that the trio gradually loosens into improvisation, and the title track settles into an unhurried mid-tempo. Grenadier's ballad CJ is the quiet centre of the album, the bass carrying the theme against washes of cymbal. Turner wrote the two longest pieces, Anandananda and Super Sister, both over ten minutes. Super Sister closes the album, with saxophone and bass lines interlocking over Ballard's murmuring drums. Without a chord instrument, the harmony is implied by Grenadier's lines and by Turner's long phrases, which range across the whole horn in wide intervals.

In DownBeat, Ken Micallef wrote that "Fly's ability to probe each member's mind is its greatest asset", and that the results "often prove revelatory". David R. Adler of Time Out New York heard Turner "surge like a wave or whisper like a flute". Stuart Nicholson in Jazzwise pointed to the thought given to exchanging roles, with the drums moving to the centre as part of each composition. The German magazine Rondo named it Jazz-CD des Monats and the French Jazzman gave it its Choc du mois.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2067, first released on 3 April 2009.