Gary Burton

CD version. The New Quartet is the 1973 album with which vibraphonist Gary Burton introduced a new band on ECM. Its members were guitarist Mick Goodrick, bassist Abraham Laboriel and drummer Harry Blazer. It was Laboriel's first recording, and he would soon become one of the most in-demand session bassists across genres. The music sits between jazz rock and post-bop, light on its feet even when the four players are at their busiest.

Burton had recently settled in Boston, and the session was held at Aengus Studios in Fayville, Massachusetts, on two days in March 1973. Manfred Eicher produced, with John Nagy as recording engineer, and the album was released that September. The programme draws on the composers around Burton at the time. It has pieces by Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Carla Bley, Michael Gibbs and Gordon Beck, plus Burton's own Brownout.

Corea's Open Your Eyes, You Can Fly opens the album with drums and bass entering a few seconds in under the vibraphone. Laboriel's lines drive the piece, and Goodrick's long guitar solo, nearly two minutes through shifting sounds and techniques, is the passage many listeners remember first. Jarrett's ballad Coral shows how soulful the vibraphone can be. Bley's Olhos de Gato is slower and more shadowy, yet the group keeps a wide dynamic range. The two Gibbs pieces that close the set make dramatic use of pauses and widen the palette of textures.

The album was well received from the start. Melody Maker called it the best Burton album in a long while and wrote in 1973 that "Laboriel sounds like a major artist in the making". Reviewing the 2019 reissue, Audiophile Audition described "a scintillating jazz album that easily stands the test of time". As Michael Engelbrecht noted on Manafonistas, the quartet was short-lived, so this album remains the main document of a line-up that launched two careers.

This CD is the 2019 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the catalogue back into print in card sleeves. The New Quartet was first released in 1973 as ECM 1030.