Joe Lovano, Marilyn Crispell, Carmen Castaldi

CD version. Joe Lovano has played on ECM records since 1981, with Paul Motian, Steve Kuhn, John Abercrombie and Marc Johnson among others. Trio Tapestry is his first album as a leader for the label. It introduces a bass-less trio with pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Carmen Castaldi, playing eleven Lovano pieces that each grow from a melodic core shaped by twelve-tone processes. The music is slow, spacious and built on close listening between three equal voices.

Lovano and Castaldi have played together since their teenage years in Cleveland, and in 1971 they moved to Boston together to study at Berklee. Lovano first crossed paths with Crispell in the mid-1980s, when she was in Anthony Braxton's quartet. Around 2006 he sat in with her trio at the Village Vanguard. Lovano plays tenor saxophone, the Hungarian tárogató and gongs, and his serial approach comes from a long association with Gunther Schuller. The album was recorded at Sear Sound in New York in March 2018 by Chris Allen, mixed at Studios La Buissonne that July, and produced by Manfred Eicher.

Silence carries much of the weight. One Time In opens with cymbals and a gong before Lovano's saxophone breaks in. Mystic, the longest piece at over eight minutes, sets the tárogató against Castaldi's rumbling percussion. Gong Episode is given to the gongs alone. Lovano has worked with them since the 1980s, striking them with a mallet in his right hand while he plays tenor, to set key centres for improvisation. The set ends with The Smiling Dog, a short and biting piece with an atonal edge that recalls Ornette Coleman.

In The Guardian, John Fordham described the album as "a mostly slow-paced but sonically exquisite fusion of free-improv and 12-tone serial music." Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times was reminded of Lovano's years in the Paul Motian Trio, another drummer-led group without bass, but singled out "the tumbling, unsettled piano of Marilyn Crispell" as the main difference. Several critics pointed to Crispell's lyrical, often forceful playing on Seeds Of Change and Rare Beauty.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2615, released on 25 January 2019.