LP version. Uma Elmo is the fifth album Danish guitarist Jakob Bro recorded as a leader for ECM, and the first by his trio with Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and Spanish drummer Jorge Rossy. There is no bass. The three had never played together before these sessions, yet the record sounds like the work of a group long used to listening to one another. All the music is by Bro, and most of it unfolds slowly, outside a fixed tempo.

The trio recorded in August and September 2020 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, with Manfred Eicher producing and Stefano Amerio as engineer. Bro had played with Paul Motian and spent years in the band of Tomasz Stanko, appearing on his ECM album Dark Eyes. Henriksen, heard here on trumpet and piccolo trumpet, made Cartography for the label in 2008. Rossy spent more than a decade in the first trio of Brad Mehldau. The title joins the middle names of Bro's two children.

Henriksen carries most of the melodies, while Bro supplies the harmony with short phrases, soft chords and looped guitar lines, and Rossy colours the music more than he drives it. The opener Reconstructing a Dream, which ECM calls a darkly lyrical reverie, builds from an intimate start over nine minutes. To Stanko is a hushed tribute to the Polish trumpeter. Music for Black Pigeons is dedicated to the memory of Lee Konitz, who gave the piece its title. On the eleven-minute Housework, Henriksen plays the trumpet with a saxophone mouthpiece, and the sound comes close to a bass clarinet.

In BBC Music Magazine, which gave it five stars, Garry Booth called the record "quintessential ECM: a small group of intensely talented individuals making rarefied music in the moment". In Jazzwise, Debra Richards heard it as "an antithesis to fidget culture" and wrote that "it resets listening". It followed Bay of Rainbows (2018), a live trio recording, and here Bro trades the bass for a second melodic voice.

This edition is the vinyl LP, ECM 2702, of an album first released in February 2021. The LP sequence holds eight pieces, with one version of Morning Song where the CD has two.