The Study of Touch is the first ECM album by Belovèd, the piano trio of the British pianist and composer Django Bates. With him are Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and Danish drummer Peter Bruun. It is the group's third record, and it came after more than ten years of playing together. Bates, known for larger and more boisterous projects, sounds unusually tender and contemplative here. The trio bends the conventions of the form from inside, with shifting metres, delayed resolutions and melodies that rarely land where expected.
The group came together when Bates was teaching at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. Its early work reshaped tunes associated with Charlie Parker, a formative influence for both Bates and Eldh. Here Parker is present in a single piece, a playful Passport. Everything else is by Bates, except This World by Iain Ballamy. Five of the Bates tunes had already appeared on the trio's 2012 album Confirmation, and they return lighter and more spacious. The album was recorded in June 2016 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Jan Erik Kongshaug and produced by Manfred Eicher.
The mixed-tempo dance of Giorgiantics is full of quick exchanges with bass and drums. Peonies As Promised has a lilting theme played in unison by piano and bass, close in spirit to a Broadway standard until Bates pulls it elsewhere. The title piece runs nearly ten minutes and moves through the widest range of moods on the record. The programme is framed by two short, matching miniatures, Sadness All the Way Down at the start and Happiness All the Way Up at the end. Bruun's drumming leans towards cymbal ticks and lightly brushed skins, and Eldh's bass supports the piano discreetly.
In The Guardian, John Fordham described it as "a session by a master improvising composer, and in ideal company." Reviewing it for London Jazz News in December 2017, Jon Turney wrote that it "immediately seems destined to go down as an ECM classic". Several critics heard Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett in its sense of space, while noting that the harmonic turns are unmistakably Bates's own.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2534, first released on 3 November 2017.
