ECM Luminessence Series Releases Namesake

Cover of the original release of the album being discussed (from its Wikipedia Web page)

Readers may recall this past Friday’s article about the new ECM Luminessence series of past CD albums reissued on vinyl. That series was named after one of those albums, whose full title is Luminessence: Music for String Orchestra and Saxophone. For those of us that are sticklers for classification, this is a true anomaly. The music was through-composed by Keith Jarrett for string orchestra. However, it was composed for saxophonist Jan Garbarek, who was allowed to improvise his part. The strings on the album were members of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra (which was known, at that time as Südfunk-Sinfonieorchester). The entire three-movement work has the structure of a concerto; but the structural properties of a classical concerto are barely evident, if they are evident at all.

This provided me with an opportunity to take advantage of the fact that I have saved one of the last published set of Schwann Catalogs, which defined a set of categories among which all available recordings could be classified. I began by consulting the Classical category, which had five entries for Jarrett, none of which were on the Luminessence album. The Jazz category, on the other hand, classified the album under both “Garbarek, Jan & Keith Jarrett” and “Jarrett, Keith & Jan Garbarek.” (Fortunately, I do not have to worry about this ambiguity when I listen to this music on my Music app! However, since I burn CDs for “hard copy backup,” I plan to keep this one in my Jarrett collection, if, for no other reason, this is the larger of the two! Furthermore, the Wikipedia page for this album classifies it as “Studio album by Keith Jarrett!”)

The music itself serves up many of the moody lyrical qualities that will be familiar to those that have encountered Jarrett’s solo performances and recordings. Nevertheless, there is an abundance of varying dispositions that arise over the course of the album, suggesting that the composer was deliberately creating an abundance of settings in which the soloist could explore distinctively different improvisations. I also think that it was wise for Jarrett to steer clear to any particularly sharp edges for the string players, leaving all of those to the saxophonist!

Taken as a whole, the album fits comfortably into my journey-of-discovery epithet; and, for my own part, I can say that new discoveries arise with each return listening experience.