The Gift is the third ECM album by the Swiss-Dutch singer Susanne Abbuehl, after April and Compass, and it continues her way of setting poetry to music. She works from inside the texts, following their own rhythms and melodies rather than fitting them to a fixed arrangement. Most of the words here are by Emily Dickinson, with poems by Emily Brontë, Sara Teasdale and Wallace Stevens and some of her own lyrics. Where Compass spoke of voyages, this record stays closer to home, to the harbour and the changing seasons.
The band was reshaped in the seven years since Compass. The Dutch pianist Wolfert Brederode, a partner since their student years at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, stays at the centre and also plays Indian harmonium. New are the Swiss flugelhorn player Matthieu Michel, who has worked with Abbuehl since 2009, and the Finnish drummer Olavi Louhivuori, heard before on Tomasz Stańko's Dark Eyes. The album was recorded in summer 2012 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro engineering. Manfred Eicher produced it, as he did her earlier discs.
Unlike the earlier albums, which drew on pieces by Chick Corea, Sun Ra, Carla Bley and Monk, the music is almost entirely Abbuehl's own. The one exception is Soon (Five Years Ago), with music by Wolfgang Lackerschmid. Michel's flugelhorn often acts as a second voice, and on This And My Heart, heard twice in different versions, horn and voice drift together in unison. Wild Nights sets the Dickinson lines about being done with the compass and the chart. In My Room takes its text from Stevens' 1919 poem On the Surface of Things, drawn in a few broad strokes by the group.
Writing for London Jazz News in August 2013, Chris Parker called it "an archetypal ECM project, thoughtful, considered, scrupulously attentive to sonic nuance and beauty". He singled out Brederode's playing, although he took issue with some of Abbuehl's changes to the poets' wording. In Jazzwise, Robert Shore heard music shaped by the natural cadences of the words, "minimal and inward-turned in character", and in the end "warmly resonant".
CD edition, ECM 2322, first released in May 2013.
