Dominic Miller

CD version. Vagabond is the third album for ECM by guitarist Dominic Miller, after the duo record Silent Light (2017), with percussionist Miles Bould, and the quintet album Absinthe (2019). Released in April 2023, it presents eight Miller originals played by a quartet. Sting's guitarist since The Soul Cages (1991) and co-writer of Shape of My Heart, Miller describes himself here as an instrumental songwriter whose band has to understand the narrative of each tune.

The quartet joins Jacob Karlzon on piano and keyboards with Miller's long-time associate Nicolas Fiszman, already on Absinthe, on bass and Ziv Ravitz on drums. The album was recorded in April 2021 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France where Miller lives and wrote most of the material. Manfred Eicher produced and Gérard de Haro engineered. The title comes from a poem by John Masefield that Miller's late father loved.

Miller plays a classical guitar, lightly amplified, and leaves plenty of room to the others instead of taking long solos. Some titles come from his surroundings: Vaugines is named after a small village in the south of France. Open Heart, the longest piece, starts with the guitar alone before the band enters over a syncopated ostinato under a minor-key tune. Mi Viejo (My Old Man) is a short solo for nylon-string guitar, written for his father. On the closing Lone Waltz, a jazz tune in triple time, Karlzon's piano raises the heat and the crescendo carries the group into its most intense passage.

In London Jazz News, Julian Maynard-Smith called Miller "a fine composer/performer and first among equals in this highly listenable quartet." Stephen Graham of Marlbank heard a sense of individuality "coated in a Mediterranean dreaminess," and noted how the themes often move away from their pristine melodies into more interesting waters. Karl Nehring of Classical Candor pointed out that the music is quiet and contemplative, built on cooperative interplay rather than trading solos. Mike Gates of UK Vibe praised the recorded sound, which he found unusually perceptive even by ECM standards, and the way all four players hit the same sweet spot.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2704, released in 2023.