Stone in the Water is the first ECM album by the Italian pianist Stefano Bollani with his Danish trio, bassist Jesper Bodilsen and drummer Morten Lund. By 2009 the three had been playing together for six years, and the two Danes had worked as a rhythm section for more than fifteen. The programme mixes their own pieces with songs by Caetano Veloso and Antonio Carlos Jobim and a piano piece by Francis Poulenc, all played with great restraint.
Bollani, born in Milan in 1972 and raised in Florence, had come to ECM through Enrico Rava, with whom he began playing in 1996 and recording for the label in 2003. His solo record Piano Solo was his first under his own name there. For both Bodilsen and Lund this was an ECM debut. The trio recorded in October 2008 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Bollani wrote four pieces and Bodilsen two.
Veloso's Dom de iludir opens the set with a descending piano figure, brushed drums and a bass solo that sets the ballad mood for much of what follows. Bodilsen's Orvieto moves in long, cascading lines, and Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes's Brigas nunca mais is light and delicate. The centre of the record is Bollani's Il cervello del pavone, which starts quietly and builds on elliptical riffs. Poulenc's Improvisation 13 en la mineur becomes a slow meditation, coloured by Lund's tactile drumming. Much of the album rests on a bass ostinato under cymbal shading, with the piano free to move across it.
In The Guardian John Fordham wrote that "Bollani loves tunes that sound sung", and that the Poulenc meditation highlights "Bollani's startling harmonic imagination". German reviewers dwelt on the group sound. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung Ueli Bernays heard a trio in which each player submits to the whole, and praised Lund's brushwork and Bodilsen's velvet tone. Tony Augarde of MusicWeb International was more reserved. He found the record tuneful but rarefied, missing the fireworks and humour of Bollani's concerts. Bodilsen and Lund later returned with him on Joy in Spite of Everything.
CD edition, ECM 2080, first released in September 2009.
