Jakob Bro, Arve Henriksen, Jorge Rossy

CD version. Uma Elmo is the fifth album Danish guitarist Jakob Bro has made as a leader for ECM, and the first with a bass-less trio featuring Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and Spanish drummer Jorge Rossy. Released in February 2021, it is a quiet, patient record of nine tracks, all composed by Bro. The title joins the middle names of his two children.

The three musicians had never played together before the sessions, held in August and September 2020 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano. Manfred Eicher produced and Stefano Amerio was the engineer. Henriksen, on trumpet and piccolo trumpet, recorded Cartography for ECM in 2008 and has worked on the label with Trio Mediaeval. Rossy is well known for his years in Brad Mehldau's first trio. Two late elders are honoured here. Bro played in Tomasz Stanko's quintet on Dark Eyes, and he toured with Lee Konitz, who gave Music for Black Pigeons its title.

The opener, Reconstructing a Dream, is a darkly lyrical reverie in which Henriksen carries the melody while Bro and Rossy hold back. Bro rarely solos; he supplies the harmonic ground, often with looped guitar layers, and Rossy colours music that is largely free of fixed tempo. In To Stanko the drums climb slowly from scattered taps to something almost martial as Henriksen sings through the horn. On Housework Henriksen fits a saxophone mouthpiece to his trumpet, producing a dark tone that recalls a bass clarinet. Morning Song appears twice, the second time as a variation that closes the album. Richard Williams heard the pieces as tone poems, more abstract than Bro's usual writing, each floating in its own pool of texture.

In BBC Music Magazine, which gave it five stars, Garry Booth described the album as "quintessential ECM: a small group of intensely talented individuals making rarefied music in the moment." For Debra Richards in Jazzwise it was "an antithesis to fidget culture" that "resets listening." Marc Medwin of The New York City Jazz Record singled out the production, finding Rossy's brushes and every quiet note from Henriksen captured with rare presence.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2702, released in 2021.