Chris Potter, David Virelles, Joe Martin, Marcus Gilmore

CD version. The Dreamer Is the Dream is the third ECM album led by the American saxophonist Chris Potter, and the first with a new acoustic quartet. Six of his own compositions, most of them long and patiently developed, balance melodic breadth with rhythmic drive. Potter plays tenor saxophone, the instrument that made him one of the most admired players of his generation, but also soprano, bass clarinet, clarinet, flute and an African thumb piano, and he brings a few discreet samples into the arrangements.

The band brings together musicians well known from ECM's New York sessions of the previous decade: David Virelles on piano and celeste, Joe Martin on double bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums and percussion. They recorded at Avatar Studios in New York in June 2016 with engineer James Farber. Manfred Eicher produced, and the album was mixed in December 2016 by Farber, Eicher and Potter. It follows Potter's earlier ECM records Imaginary Cities and The Sirens.

The opener, Heart in Hand, is a tenor ballad in which Potter's lines settle into the spaces left by Virelles's piano. Ilimba takes its name from the Tanzanian thumb piano heard in it. Here Potter and Martin move in lockstep while Virelles and Gilmore build a contrasting rhythmic layer, and the piece opens into one of the album's most energetic improvisations. The title track is a songlike theme for bass clarinet with an extended bass solo by Martin. Memory and Desire sets folk-inflected soprano against carefully placed samples, and Yasodhara brings in Indian rhythms and a long, searching solo by Virelles.

In The Guardian, John Fordham heard a new creative tension in the group, with two partnerships working inside it, Potter with his longtime bassist Martin and Virelles with Gilmore. He called the title track a standout, "with its ardent, songlike theme for bass clarinet." Peter Bacon of London Jazz News wrote in May 2017 that "with each release he leaps forward as a composer," and he found that Virelles fitted this band better than any other group he had heard him in. The New Yorker has written that Potter puts his considerable technique in the service of music rather than spectacle.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2519, first released on 21 April 2017.