Small Places is the second ECM album by double bassist and composer Michael Formanek. He recorded it with the same quartet as his 2010 debut as a leader on the label, The Rub and Spare Change. By now the four were a working band shaped by tours in Europe and the United States, and the record shows it. Composition and improvisation blend so closely that it is often hard to tell where the written music stops.
Formanek wrote all eight pieces for the players he had toured with: Tim Berne on alto saxophone, Craig Taborn on piano and Gerald Cleaver on drums and shruti box. "I wrote it based on my experience of what they can do," he said of the material. The quartet played the full repertoire in a New York club just before going into Avatar Studios in December 2011. Manfred Eicher produced, with Aya Merrill as engineer.
Formanek pushed the writing in two directions at once, more tightly structured in the driving Rising Tensions And Awesome Light and more open in the shadowy Wobble And Spill. The 18-minute Parting Ways is the centre of the album. It opens with solemn solo piano and builds slowly through solos by Taborn and Berne to a dialogue of bass and drums. Soft Reality closes over drones of arco bass and shruti box, with Berne's keening alto on top. The title refers to what Formanek calls "the things within the thing", the small cells moving under the surface that Taborn and Cleaver keep alive throughout.
JazzTimes found the title apt for compositions "which have many small sections", adding that "even when the sound becomes spare and quiet, the suspense never flags." In The Jazzmann in 2013, Ian Mann called it "a truly classic small group recording", tighter than its predecessor. Berne has described the band's way of playing as "four strong opinions each having his say", a phrase that fits a record without fixed roles of soloist and accompanist. It came out in the same year as Berne's own ECM debut as a leader, Snakeoil, and a year after Taborn's solo album Avenging Angel.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2267, first released in September 2012.
