Wolfgang Muthspiel, Ambrose Akinmusire, Brad Mehldau, Larry Grenadier, Eric Harland

CD version. Where The River Goes carries forward the story of Rising Grace, the 2016 album on which Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel first led a quintet with Brad Mehldau, Ambrose Akinmusire and Larry Grenadier. The same four return here, with Eric Harland taking over the drum chair from Brian Blade. The result is less an all-star session than a band with its own identity, heard in Muthspiel's tunes and in its collective playing.

The quintet recorded at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France, in February 2018, the studio where Rising Grace had been made two years earlier, in January 2016. Manfred Eicher produced, with Gérard de Haro and Nicolas Baillard as engineers. Muthspiel wrote five of the eight pieces and shares Descendants with Harland. Mehldau contributed Blueshead, and Clearing is a group improvisation credited to all five musicians. Muthspiel and Grenadier have worked together for about three decades.

The title track opens with Muthspiel alone, feeling his way into the melody and chords before settling into a strummed figure. Mehldau adds a line over the top, Grenadier joins, and a drum roll from Harland brings in Akinmusire to state the theme outright. Throughout the album the trumpeter's plaintive tone in the minor-key passages is sometimes roughened by slurs and tonguing effects. For Django builds around a long exchange between guitar and piano, the two lines circling each other. Clearing is the freest moment, a collective improvisation in which the group finds its form as it plays. Mehldau's Blueshead is a many-sided blues that gives every player room, while Buenos Aires is a short piece for guitar alone and Panorama closes the album as a duo with Harland.

Writing in DownBeat in November 2018, Suzanne Lorge heard each player "expounding on the guitarist's musical assertions" and concluded: "Their discourse is one of understated beauty." John Fordham in Gramophone found enough balance between solo meditation and collective exploration "to intrigue both jazz voyagers and pursuers of blues and leftfield perceptions of swing".

This is the CD edition, ECM 2610, first released on 5 October 2018, in a jewel case with a 28-page booklet inside a card O-card.