This coming Friday, ECM will release a new trio album entitled Windflower. Ayumi Tanaka leads from the piano with rhythm provided by Thomas Morgan on bass and drummer Thomas Strønen. There are nine tracks, eight of which are “group compositions” by the entire trio. Only the second track, “La Source” was composed only by Tanaka.
At the end of this past April, I wrote about the ECM album Homage, a jazz quartet led by tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano with the Marcin Wasilewskl Trio. On that occasion I revived an old (from 2012) trope describing the album as “an introspective quietude, rather than a more superficial retreat into ‘easy listening.’” It would be fair to describe the relationship between Windflower and Homage by the age-old-trope: “This is the sort of thing that people who like that sort of thing will like!”
To be fair, I am one of those “people.” Half a year after enjoying my first encounter with Homage, I am definitely ready for more! After all, my last encounter with Morgan was the article I wrote in November of 2024 about the ECM release of a ten-year old recording session. On the other hand, both Tanaka and Strønen were new to me, even though they were part of a combo here in my home town of San Francisco at the Red Poppy Art House back in June of 2018.
Mind you, I found the booklet photograph of Tanaka wistfully staring off into space to be a little bit too much. Fortunately, I was able to find one of her focused on her piano performance:
As far as I am concerned, that photograph provides just the right context for anyone listening attentively to any of the tracks on this album!
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