Andy Sheppard, Michel Benita, Sebastian Rochford

Trio Libero is the debut of a saxophone, bass and drums trio convened by the British saxophonist Andy Sheppard with the French bassist Michel Benita and the drummer Sebastian Rochford. It is Sheppard's second leader album for ECM, after Movements in Colour. The thirteen short pieces leave room for melodies to breathe and for each player to answer the others at any moment, which is the freedom the band's name refers to.

The trio took shape at a 2009 residency at Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh, where Sheppard had the three improvise for four days and recorded everything. Several pieces born there reached this album. The Unconditional Secret, in Sheppard's words, is more or less a straight transcription of one of those free improvisations. Their method, as he put it, was to "improvise, write it down, develop it, then replay the tune with fresh improvisation". Sheppard plays tenor and soprano saxophones. Benita, born in Algiers and active on the Paris scene since the early 1980s, first played with Sheppard during that decade, when the saxophonist lived in Paris. Rochford, known for his band Polar Bear, says his interest in playing jazz began when he saw Sheppard in concert in his home town of Aberdeen at fifteen. The album was recorded in July 2011 at the Auditorio of Radiotelevisione svizzera in Lugano, engineered by Stefano Amerio and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The repertoire mixes originals by all three, collective improvisations and one standard, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, played on soprano with Benita's bass quietly pulling at the line. The opener Libertino is a light-stepping Sheppard melody in which tenor fragments turn into quiet snare-drum patterns and tom-tom accents. In the two parts of Spacewalk, long saxophone notes float over bowed bass.

John Fordham in The Guardian found the record "low-key, but glowing with life", and heard a "pristine, shivery beauty" in the Spacewalk pieces. Reviewing it for London Jazz News in January 2012, Chris Parker wrote that the mix of spontaneity and familiarity "infuses everything the trio play with improvisational tension". He also thought the result would remind many listeners of Paul Motian's albums for ECM.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2252, first released in January 2012.