Track Listing

1. Some Echoes
2. She Way Young
3. Nowhere One
4. Colors
5. Home
6. In the Fall
7. You Didn't Think
8. Ice Cream
9. Echo
10. Midnight

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #672110 in Music
• Released on: 1994-10-25

Customer Reviews

This record is unlike any other
It really is. Steve Swallow, one of the world's great jazz bassists, together with nonpareil singer Sheila Jordan and an allstar ensemble including pianists Steve Kuhn and Lyle Mays, has set a series of Robert Creeley poems to music. But...it isn't a stiff exercise. It COOKS! The songs swing hard, but leave ample room for appreciation of Creeley's brilliant words: these songs are sad and funny, ironic and sincere, and very human. Swallow's compositions are brilliant and gorgeously played. This is one of my favorite records, and one of ECM's hidden gems.

Bringing out a poet's voice inside the poems
This is a fine (& rare) example of a composer really hearing & bringing out a poet's voice inside the poems. Bob Creeley's concentrated poetry packs an emotional wallop behind an occasionally cool facade. So it is an interesting test to place these words/lyrics with a female singer. Perhaps the most important test is that the poems do function as lyrics, generating an unexpected musical-ness. The band is wonderful. Everyone plays with creative committment to the material & to Steve Swallow's vision. The proceedings feel a bit dry here & there, the Manfred Eicher Effect. But this is a very good album; one of the few I recommend to poets for both pleasure & the possibilities it suggests.

Bob Rixon

Sheila Jordan - Vocals, Voices
Steve Kuhn - Piano
Bob Moses - Drums
Steve Swallow - Bass
Manfred Eicher - Producer
Dave Liebman - Saxophone, Sax (Soprano), Sax (Tenor)
Lyle Mays - Synthesizer