Mathias Eick

CD version. When We Leave is the fifth ECM album by the Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, and in his own words "almost a Ravensburg 2. More of everything." The full band of Ravensburg, his warm look at his Norwegian and South German family roots, returns here. It is joined by the pedal steel guitar of Stian Carstensen, last heard with Eick on his 2008 debut The Door. Where the earlier record drew portraits of friends and relatives, this one follows its characters through a troubled year, in seven pieces with one-word titles.

Violinist Håkon Aase shadows the trumpet with lines drawn from folk music as well as jazz. Two drummers, Torstein Lofthus and Helge Andreas Norbakken, work side by side, a format Eick introduced on Skala: he wanted the rhythm more three-dimensional, not louder. Pianist Andreas Ulvo brings a classical touch, and bassist Audun Erlien, in the band since the first album, a groove shaped by years of soul and funk. Eick himself also plays keyboards and sings. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in August 2020 and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The opening Loving sets the tone, murmuring trumpet over bustling drums, with Aase's violin and swells of steel guitar woven around it. Arvo, a quiet nod to the triadic harmonies of Arvo Pärt, begins with Eick's wordless voice and builds over insistent snare drums. Flying is the most spacious piece, sparse trumpet in a still field of piano and light percussion. Begging ends the album on a slow, hymn-like note. Throughout, the pedal steel is used less as a solo voice than as a bed of sustained harmony under violin and trumpet.

Jim Gilchrist of The Scotsman heard in Eick's tone "the voice-like melancholy of an Armenian duduk", and described the band as a well-chosen septet. Nate Chinen, writing for WBGO in 2021, called the album "chamberlike and fusionesque by turns" and praised Eick's growth as a bandleader. In the German Jazzpodium, Ulrich Steinmetzger heard the seven originals fall into place like a single suite.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2660, first released on 24 September 2021.