Baida is the first ECM album as a leader by the New York trumpeter Ralph Alessi, long a first-call improviser for Steve Coleman, Uri Caine, Ravi Coltrane, Fred Hersch and Don Byron. It brings ten of his own compositions, with the title piece returning as a reprise at the end. The quartet had been playing together on and off for a decade. Its music places his clear, rounded tone inside a group sound where space and interplay count as much as the solos.
Alessi is joined by pianist Jason Moran, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Nasheet Waits. The four first recorded together on a few tunes of Alessi's 2002 album This Against That, and again on Cognitive Dissonance in 2010. Alessi and Gress had played together since the late 1990s in one of Caine's groups, while Waits and Alessi met in Hersch's quintet. Manfred Eicher produced the session at Avatar Studios, New York, in October 2012, with James Farber as engineer. Alessi gives the band full scores, and he credits Moran with orchestrating in real time, doubling melodies and adding countermelodies around the trumpet.
The title piece opens the album at length, with Alessi on open horn and Waits placing sparse first sounds in a wide space. It comes back at the close in a flowing version for Harmon mute. Throwing Like a Girl starts from a deep-toned figure by Gress; muted trumpet and piano then move in unison over a near-military snare pattern. Maria Lydia is a ballad written for Alessi's mother, an opera singer, who died shortly after the recording was finished. Between these points the pieces run from rubato musings to tightly rhythmic writing, often built on bass lines that act as melodies. The album title, a lighter touch, is his young daughter's word for blanket.
In The Guardian, John Fordham heard Alessi "quietly wired and fascinated by what his partners are firing at him". He added that Gress and Waits "keep the pressure up but not the volume", and compared some passages to the mid-1960s Miles Davis quintet. Chris Parker reviewed the album for London Jazz News in October 2013. He admired the trumpeter's precision, but warned that the music is not always immediately accessible, since Alessi "frequently chooses the road less travelled".
CD edition, ECM 2321, first released in October 2013.
