Universal Syncopations brought Miroslav Vitous back to ECM after ten years, with a quintet of musicians who had shared stages with him since the late 1960s. The Czech bassist, a founding member of Weather Report, took his own 1969 debut Infinite Search as a model. The result is acoustic, open, swinging jazz built on his compositions, closer in spirit to the years before fusion than to fusion itself.
Jan Garbarek plays soprano and tenor saxophones, Chick Corea piano, John McLaughlin guitar and Jack DeJohnette drums. A brass trio of Wayne Bergeron, Valery Ponomarev and Isaac Smith joins them on three tracks. The album took shape between March 2000 and March 2003, at Vitous's Universal Syncopations studio and at Rainbow Studio in Oslo. Vitous has explained that he began with four days of bass and drums with DeJohnette. The others were recorded separately, Corea in Florida and McLaughlin in Monaco among them. He produced it with Manfred Eicher, and edited and mixed it with Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug.
All nine pieces are by Vitous, two of them written with Garbarek and one with DeJohnette. Bamboo Forest opens with Garbarek's soprano over a light Latin pulse, and McLaughlin's first phrase quotes Wes Montgomery's West Coast Blues. On Univoyage the group edges towards free playing, held back by short, sparing figures from the brass. Beethoven is a funky call and response between bass and saxophone over clipped drums, and the slow Brazil Waves closes the record on a dark murmur of bass.
The album was placed on the quarterly list of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (1/2004) and named Choc de l'année by Jazzman, while Stereoplay made it its CD of the month. In The Guardian, John Fordham called it "a wonderful contemporary jazz set with a sense of the past", where the players rethink their histories for the sake of the present. Stuart Nicholson in Jazzwise heard "a natural extension of the questing brilliance of his 1969 album, Infinite Search". Vitous returned to the idea in 2007 with Universal Syncopations II.
CD, ECM 1863, first released on 29 September 2003.
