Larry Grenadier

CD version. The Gleaners is the first solo bass recording by the American double bassist Larry Grenadier, and his first album under his own name for ECM Records. Its title comes from Agnès Varda's film The Gleaners and I. Like Varda's gleaners, Grenadier gathers material from many fields, setting his own pieces beside music by Gershwin, Coltrane, Paul Motian, Rebecca Martin and Wolfgang Muthspiel.

Grenadier is best known from the trio of Brad Mehldau and from work with Paul Motian, Pat Metheny and Muthspiel, among others. After decades spent shaping other people's music from the middle of the band, he steps forward here entirely alone. The session was Manfred Eicher's idea, and it adds to a label tradition of unaccompanied bass albums. It was recorded at Avatar Studios in New York in December 2016 by engineer James Farber. It was mixed in February 2018 at Studios La Buissonne by Grenadier and Eicher with Gérard de Haro. In his liner note Grenadier describes the process as "an excavation into the core elements of who I am as a bass player".

Across twelve tracks and a little over forty minutes, bowed and plucked pieces alternate more or less evenly. Oceanic opens with sumptuous arco lines, while Pettiford, a dedication to the early hero Oscar Pettiford, drives forward in blues-inflected pizzicato. Woebegone is one of the rare multi-tracked moments, layering plucked and bowed bass. The longest track joins Coltrane's Compassion to Motian's ballad The Owl Of Cranston, moving from meditation to controlled intensity. Gershwin's My Man's Gone Now, the one standard, leads to A Novel In A Sigh, a coda of under a minute. Muthspiel's two short bagatelles, written for Grenadier, sit between austere and playful moods.

Critics placed the album beside ECM's solo bass statements by Dave Holland, Gary Peacock, Miroslav Vitous and Barre Phillips. Thom Jurek of AllMusic heard "an inner exploration articulated with uncommon generosity, disciplined artistry, and a poet's gift for illumination". In Jazz Journal in 2019 Fred Grand called it "brilliantly conceived and executed from start to finish". Jon Turney of London Jazz News praised James Farber's recording of the instrument and the stripped-down focus of the music.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2560, first released on 15 February 2019.