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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quiet freedom,
By G B (Connecticut) - See all my reviews
This review is from: I Have the Room Above Her (Audio CD)
In the liner notes to another ECM album, a musician (Edward Vesala, I think) suggests that playing "free ballads" is one of the hardest things to do in jazz. I guess it has to do with reconciling the tension between free or avant-garde playing and the sensitivity necessary to pull off a great ballad performance. I only mention this because I think the three musicians on this CD do a great job of reconciling these two tensions, offering what's essentially a "ballads" album containing adventurous and challenging improvisation.
The album starts out slowly, with "Osmosis Part III" sounding like we're joining things about halfway through. It sounds like 3 am and the musicians are quietly lamenting some great loss. The next few tunes, with the exception of "Odd Man Out", all proceed at a very relaxed, dreamy pace. There's a beautiful interpretation of the title tune and another, shorter version (excerpt?) of "Osmosis" to close off the first half. The second half of the album is more up-tempo, and the individual songs better defined. "Dance" is a classic Motian tune, hummable yet convoluted, with some feisty interplay between the trio. "Harmony" starts out as a Motian-Lovano duet, one of the few tunes here that contains a really linear pulse. Lovano's playing on this tune is all about quiet, controlled intensity. "The Riot Act" is the tune where Frisell dips into his effects most heavily (though he does it in a more subtle fashion on other parts of the album). "One in Three" is an unusual mix of alternating ballad and intense non-ballad sections. The album closes in a melodic fashion with "Dreamland". As other people have commented, Bill Frisell is at his "jazziest" here -- a few effects here and there, plenty of his characteristic twang. Lovano plays warmly, beautifully, and brilliantly; the comparisons another reviewer made to Lester Young and Stan Getz are appropriate, not because Lovano sounds like them, but because there's the same appreciation that "sound" matters as much as "notes". "Dewey Redman meets Lester Young" isn't too off the mark. And Mr. Motian sounds like he's having a great time. He's not especially interested in "drumming" here, but there aren't many drummers who understand melody as well as he does. You can get a lot out of this album just by listening to him. If this sounds like your kind of thing, then I really recommend picking up this album. Just three veteran musicians enjoying themselves making subtle, beautiful music. When the CD stops, the mood lingers. (I think the comparison made to Charles Lloyd's Voice in the Night album is interesting, and if you like the "mood" of the ballads on that album then you'll like what you find here. That said, that album was a lot more straight-ahead, up-tempo and explicitly blues-rooted. This one is more introverted and a lot more "free", as the jazz parlance goes.)
66 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Noirish Americana, set in a blasted cityscape,
By
This review is from: I Have the Room Above Her (Audio CD)
Featuring mostly dreamy, spacey balladlike tone poems, I Have the Room Above Her creates an alluring aural palette that by turns beguiles, mesmerizes, and mystifies. This magical music operates in territory not unlike that of late nineties Charles Lloyd (specifically, Voice in the Night) with Frisell spinning out moody Abercrombie-isms, Motian channeling the spirit of the great Billy Higgins, and Lovano digging into the very darkest heart of his instrument and uncovering balladic statements of such depth and poignancy as to nearly wring tears from the listener. The result: 3-in-the-morning heartbreak music of immense proportions.
The title tune, a lovely line by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, here handled with a delicate despair, conjures up an entire world of longing, perfectly captured in the crepuscular disc sleeve photograph. With but little imagining an entire cinematic drama of loneliness and desperation set amid urban squalor unfolds in one's head as the evocative tunes ("Odd Man Out," "Shadows," "Dance," "The Riot Act," "The Bag Man," "One in Three") spin by. As the never-to-be star-crossed romance slouches away from the imaginary film's protagonist, the music takes on an edgy, brittle dissonance, and we're left with the wistful remnants of a ghostly "Dreamland." Gorgeously engineered by James A. Farber assisted by Aya Takemura, and produced by the inimitable Manfred Eicher, this represents a high point in the ECM catalog, making it one of the finest jazz recordings of all time. Anyone even slightly drawn to the dusky jazz so brilliantly realized here will want to check out this very special disc. Highest recommendation.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The most legitimate of all poetical tone is melancholy." EA Poe,
By Jazzcat "stef" (Genoa, Italy Italy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: I Have the Room Above Her (Audio CD)
A superb performance by three exceptional players which seem telepathically linked. These three men can create lakes of notes, sea of notes where you can swim freely with your mind, where you can get lost. The sense of a big space is something that you can immediatly perceive from the first notes of this recording. And it's not a mere case because you have here two of the best players when atmosphere time comes, Bill Frisell (with his nice ambient, chorused, bell like guitar tone ... and with his nice open, unresolved and suspended chords) and Paul Motian (delicate and creative in his approach to the drum set). They can create here at their best, without the firm pulse of a double bass (there isn't one at all by the way). So here they litirally paint scenaries in space, they create watercolours of notes, sounds tapestries on which Joe Lovano superimpose melodies and comments like words, sentences, thoughts with nice melancholy. This is a spectacular recording even from an hiend enthusiast point of view. The stage is big, very dimensional, the listening session very satisfying. Few tunes break for a little the sense of pace of the recording, for instance the third, "Odd man out" which speaks a more earthly language. Or the standard tune "I have the room above her" ... more romantic and less spacial, less ethereal. Or also in "Dance" which as the title state, we find ourselves obviously more in a "free, atonal jazz" type of context, with more rhythmic figures going on, more impulse, a sense of urgency. But with "Shadows" for example we are again shoot in space. Let your thoughts run freely while you enjoy the delicate and intimate atmospheres, these three master musicians can create. "The most legitimate of all poetical tone is melancholy." Edgar Allan Poe
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