Robin Williamson

Trusting In The Rising Light is the fourth ECM album by the Scottish singer, harpist and guitarist Robin Williamson, and the first of them made entirely of his own songs. The three before it set words by other poets, from Henry Vaughan and Taliesin to Walt Whitman and William Blake. Here Williamson writes his own lyrics, twelve meditations on love, destiny, the natural world, roads travelled and the plain pleasure of being alive today.

First known through the Incredible String Band, Williamson sings and plays Celtic harp, guitar, Hardanger fiddle and whistles. The violist Mat Maneri returns from Skirting The River Road and The Iron Stone. Ches Smith, heard on ECM with Tim Berne's Snakeoil, adds vibraphone, drums, gongs and percussion. Producer Steve Lake has recalled that Williamson asked to work with Maneri again, and that Manfred Eicher suggested Smith, who already played in a trio with Maneri. The album was recorded in January 2014 at Rockfield Studios, a residential studio near Monmouth in Wales.

Some pieces had their parts mapped out in advance, while others were left open, and four of the twelve are credited to Williamson together with his partners. Our Evening Walk moves like a droning raga. The Cards, for voice and guitar, is loosely based on the traditional Irish air The Coolin. Swan was freely improvised by the trio around Williamson's words. Across the record, as David Kidman observed in Folkradio, the sugary blocks of the vibraphone both match and contrast with the microtonal lines of Maneri's viola.

Tim Owen in Dalston Sound called it "his most personal collection of songs to date", and judged that Williamson's own lyric poetry stands comparison with the poets he had set before. In Jazzwise, Michael Horovitz wrote of "a unique and veritable treasury of truly jazzwise hymns, at once deeply ancient and unimpeachably modern". Horovitz also heard how the voice has toughened over the decades, ranging from gruff and deep to a shimmering falsetto. In Aesthetica, Hannah Clugston noted how closely the contributions of Maneri and Smith respond to the vocals.

This is the CD edition of ECM 2393, first released in November 2014 and produced by Steve Lake.