Dominic Miller

LP version. Vagabond is the third album guitarist Dominic Miller made for ECM, and the first with this quartet. The Argentine-born musician, guitarist in Sting's band since The Soul Cages in 1991, sees himself as "an instrumental songwriter" and says it was never his intention to make a guitar album. The eight pieces, all his own, are concise and melodic, and they leave much of the foreground to the group.

His partners are the Swedish pianist Jacob Karlzon, also on keyboards, bassist Nicolas Fiszman, a long-time associate who had already played on Absinthe (2019), and drummer Ziv Ravitz. Miller's first ECM album, Silent Light (2017), had been a duo record with a percussionist. The quartet recorded in April 2021 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, with Gérard de Haro engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Writing in Tonart, Volker Doberstein described Miller's method: once the writing is done, he invites the players to his home in the south of France for three days before going into the studio.

Few of the pieces are built around solos. All Change opens on an arpeggiated guitar figure, with the piano keeping the music moving above the rhythm section. Clandestin is the most outgoing track, growing from a gentle guitar riff over rippling piano to a firm pulse and a quicksilver piano solo. Mi Viejo is a short piece for nylon-string guitar alone. In the closing Lone Waltz, Karlzon adds heat until a crescendo takes the music somewhere more intimate, as Stephen Graham put it in Marlbank. Elsewhere, on Open Heart and Vaugines, keyboards add a light synthesizer colouring.

Reviewing it for London Jazz News in 2023, Julian Maynard-Smith called Miller "a fine composer/performer and first among equals in this highly listenable quartet". In The Big Takeover, Michael Toland compared the record's genre-defying pictures to those of Oregon, and found it "expertly performed, instantly appealing and, after a few listens, often sublime". Peter Rüedi of the Swiss weekly Weltwoche singled out the exchange between guitar and piano, two harmony instruments that leave room for each other.

This edition is the vinyl LP, ECM 2704, released in April 2023 together with the CD.