Jakob Bro, Thomas Morgan, Joey Baron

CD version. Streams is the second ECM album as leader by the Danish guitarist Jakob Bro, following the prizewinning Gefion. It keeps the trio format and the close partnership with bassist Thomas Morgan, and brings in Joey Baron on drums in place of Jon Christensen. The music rests on melody, space and layered sound, with guitar and bass often developing improvised ideas side by side.

Bro calls Morgan "my musical soul mate". The choice of Baron closes a circle, since Bro first came across Morgan when the bassist was playing in Baron's band about a decade earlier. Bro and Morgan had both played in Paul Motian's groups, and Motian's way with melody runs through Bro's writing. The trio recorded in November 2015 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard as engineers and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The opener, Opal, sets the tone, with Baron ending it on soft, scattered drops of sound. Five of the seven tracks are new Bro pieces, and Heroines appears twice, first as a gently weaving trio tune with a ringing guitar line and later as a short unaccompanied solo. PM Dream, a collective improvisation dedicated to Motian, begins in long tones, bass urgings and twitching snare before turning metallic and intense. Full Moon Europa, at over ten minutes the longest track, moves from unison plucking by guitar and bass to sharp guitar outbursts pushed by Baron. Shell Pink, which Karl Lippegaus in Fono Forum heard as a charming folk waltz, has the strings barely brushed around the rhythm. The album then ends without a climax, on the quiet close of Sisimiut.

Reviewers praised the drummer's arrival. Cormac Larkin, in The Irish Times in 2016, called Baron "an inspired substitution" and the album "mournful, beautiful, dark yet luminous music for Beckett fans". John Fordham wrote in The Guardian that "this trio is a highly melodic and unpredictably dramatic outfit", though far from guitar-hero music. Ken Micallef gave it four and a half stars in DownBeat, and he and Garry Booth in BBC Music Magazine stressed its restraint and its resistance to easy labels.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2499, first released on 23 September 2016.