Surrounded by Sea is the third ECM album by the British saxophonist Andy Sheppard. It adds the Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset to Trio Libero, Sheppard's group with the bassist Michel Benita and the drummer Sebastian Rochford. Aarset's drones and electronics give the band a harmonic floor, and over it Sheppard plays some of his most lyrical saxophone. A Gaelic traditional song, heard in three parts, runs through the album as its thread.
The quartet recorded in August 2014 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo of RSI in Lugano, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stefano Amerio as engineer. Sheppard plays tenor and soprano saxophones. Trio Libero had begun as an improvising trio, documented on its 2011 ECM album. Here Sheppard wanted "to retain the same musicality but move things in a new direction with the addition of harmony and subtle grooves". Aarset was no stranger, having played on Movements in Colour, Sheppard's first ECM album as leader, in 2008. Benita contributed A Letter and Rochford They Aren't Perfect and Neither Am I.
The Gaelic song is Aoidh, Na Dean Cadal Idir (Aoidh, don't sleep at all), which Sheppard learned from the Hebridean singer Julie Fowlis. For a planned project with her, he and the others had recorded parts around her a cappella version, and that experiment gave him the idea for this line-up. When the quartet played it in Lugano, Eicher waved them on into a long version, then suggested cutting it into three sections placed across the record. The other cover is Elvis Costello's I Want to Vanish, introduced to Sheppard by Benita and played on soprano with soft brushwork. The closing Looking for Ornette nods to Ornette Coleman in its title more than in its sound.
John Fordham in The Guardian heard "a tip-toeing delicacy to much of the album, with Sheppard's phrasing often pared to hoots and whispers". He called the record an intriguing shift for Sheppard as player and bandleader. John Kelman of All About Jazz described "an intimate statement whose chemistry belies the quartet's brief existence". Opinion was not unanimous. The Jazzmann reported that Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph found Aarset's electronics smothering, while its own reviewer recommended the album with slight reservations.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2432, first released on 17 April 2015.
