Xieyi is the first ECM album under the name of the Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, a solo double bass recital framed by short pieces for brass quartet. The Chinese title means literally "to write life's sense" and also names a style of ink painting made with free brushstrokes. Jormin uses his instrument to sing songs that have marked his own life: Scandinavian hymns, Latin American song, Swedish tone poems, a piece by Ornette Coleman and his own improvisations.
By 2001 Jormin had played on many ECM records, with Bobo Stenson, Charles Lloyd, Tomasz Stanko and Don Cherry. The bass pieces were all taped on one rainy evening, 17 December 1999, in the Organ Hall of the music school at Artisten in Göteborg, with Johannes Lundberg engineering. The project began as a pure solo album. At the suggestion of producer Manfred Eicher, Jormin added six brief brass pieces, recorded on 2 October 2000 at Studio Bohus in Kungälv by trumpet, French horn, trombone and bass trombone.
The brass miniatures open and close the programme with a Choral and return between the solos, written, in Jormin's words, with "the same goal of simplicity and arioso feeling". Among the bass pieces, Sibelius's hymn Giv mig ej glans and Söderblom's I denna ljuva sommartid are plucked with sober restraint. On Gracias a la vida by Violeta Parra he works harmonics into the melody. War Orphans, which had given its title to a 1998 Stenson trio album, is played with the bow, groaning at first before the fragile theme emerges.
Critics singled out how melodic the record is. In The Wire, Andy Hamilton wrote that "few solo bass albums can be as melodic as this one", and called the Coleman piece "stupendous". Roger Thomas of Jazzreview heard in Jormin's solo voice "a tendency towards the delicate, the melodic and the quietly mischievous". ECM itself presented the album as a companion to the Stenson trio's Serenity, which mixes song, improvisation and composition in a similar way. Writing in 2013 for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo picked out Stefan Forssén's Och kanske är det natt as the most lyrical track.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1762, with seventeen tracks and liner notes by Jormin. It was first released by ECM on 1 October 2001.
