Angular Blues is the fourth ECM album as a leader by the Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel, and his second in trio after Driftwood (2014). Brian Blade is again on drums, while Scott Colley takes the place of Larry Grenadier on double bass and gives the group a more earthy low end. The record also opens new ground for Muthspiel on the label: his first standards for ECM, and his first bebop tune on rhythm changes ever put on record.
Muthspiel and Colley first played together in the 1990s, and Blade is a longtime partner of the guitarist. The trio recorded at Studio Dede in Tokyo in August 2018, after a run of concerts at the city's Cotton Club. Shinya Matsushita engineered the session. The mix was done at Studios La Buissonne in the south of France by Gérard de Haro, Muthspiel and Manfred Eicher, who produced the album.
Muthspiel plays acoustic guitar on the first three pieces and electric on the rest. The opener, Wondering, is a melody he wrote for Colley's bass, and the title track plays games with odd breaks and rhythmic shifts. Hüttengriffe is a quiet folk-like piece built on the first chords a guitarist learns, carried by Colley's bass and Blade's brushes. Ride is the bebop number, quick lines over the changes. In Solo Kanon in 5/4, the only guitar-only track, an electronic delay turns his lines into baroque-like rounds, and in its companion Kanon in 6/8 the delay works inside the full trio. The two standards are Cole Porter's Everything I Love, played fairly straight, and a looser, vamp-based I'll Remember April.
Reviews in 2020 dwelt on the balance of the three players. In All About Jazz, Dan Bilawsky called the album "a marvel of ingenious interplay, musical sensitivity and absolute sincerity" and rated it Muthspiel's strongest set for the label. John Bungey of The Times heard echoes of Scarlatti and Bach in the solo canon and called it "a high point of a quietly impressive album". Ian Mann, on The Jazz Mann, heard a classy, relaxed record in which the interplay of the three counts more than any solo.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2655, first released on 20 March 2020.
