Benjamin Lackner, Mathias Eick, Mark Turner, Linda May Han Oh, Matthieu Chazarenc

CD version. On Spindrift, his second album for ECM, the German-American pianist Benjamin Lackner leads a newly formed quintet built around two horns. Trumpeter Mathias Eick is the only player kept from his 2022 label debut Last Decade, and his dialogue with the tenor saxophone of Mark Turner shapes the whole record. It is a programme of lyrical originals in which melody and ensemble chemistry come before individual display.

The rhythm section pairs bassist Linda May Han Oh with French drummer Matthieu Chazarenc, who played in Lackner's trio before the pianist's time with ECM. The session took place in March 2024 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, with Gérard de Haro engineering. Manfred Eicher produced the album. Nine of the ten pieces are by Lackner, and Chazarenc contributed the tenth, Chambary. Most tracks run between three and five minutes, so the themes stay compact.

Trumpet and saxophone usually take the lead as a small section of their own, trading phrases or weaving counterlines, while the piano colours and binds the group from behind. The title track moves from a rubato opening into a flowing 7/4, over which Lackner and Turner stretch out. Mosquito Flats, the longest piece at over eight minutes, opens with piano and bowed bass before the two horns answer each other and finally meet in unison. Murnau, which takes its name from the director of Nosferatu, is darker, with Eick's open horn singing over shadowed piano and bass. The record closes quietly with Out Of The Fog.

Critics heard it as chamber jazz with a clear group identity. In The Guardian John Fordham described "breathily wistful, bass-embroidered film-noirish melodies" mixed with "headlong tenor/trumpet contrapuntal passages" and sparing piano. For Andy Hamilton in Jazz Journal it was "an excellent and empathetic band", with Murnau as the standout. Jack Kenny in All About Jazz wrote that the writing softens the gap between notation and improvisation, and praised the stillness and clarity of the La Buissonne recording. Tyran Grillo on ECM Reviews found Lackner's playing "revelatory yet humble, never appropriating center stage."

This is the CD edition, ECM 2832, released in January 2025.