CD version. En attendant is the seventh ECM album by the Marcin Wasilewski Trio, the Polish group that has played together since 1993. They first reached the label as three quarters of Tomasz Stańko's quartet, and Stańko said that Polish jazz had "never had a band like this one". It sets three collective improvisations beside a Wasilewski ballad, a Bach variation, a Carla Bley tune and a Doors song. The French title means "in the meantime".
Pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michał Miśkiewicz recorded the album in August 2019 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, in the south of France. The sessions came shortly before their work with Joe Lovano on Arctic Riff. Manfred Eicher produced, and Gérard de Haro was the engineer. Their earlier trio albums for ECM include Trio, January, Faithful and Live.
The three-part In Motion opens the record, returns at its centre and closes it, each part credited to all three players. The first is restless and kinetic, the second quieter and more suspended, the third a meditative opening that gives way to an elegiac bass line. Bach's Variation No. 25 from the Goldberg Variations, the minor-key aria of the set, is treated with open, searching freedom while keeping its long melodic line. Vashkar, which Paul Bley first recorded in 1963, gives Kurkiewicz a prominent role. Glimmer of Hope, first heard on Arctic Riff, returns in trio form, and Riders on the Storm keeps its easy groove even as it drifts far from the song's structure. It continues a habit of the trio, whose albums have also reworked songs by Prince, Björk and Sting. In the composed pieces Miśkiewicz often drives grooves that build steadily in intensity.
Selwyn Harris in Jazzwise called the trio "as close to an inseparable collective force as you can get in jazz", and heard the Doors cover as "a masterstroke of taste". Thomas Conrad in Stereophile noted how Kurkiewicz's bass had become a darker counterpart to Wasilewski's piano, and named Riders on the Storm the high point.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2677, first released on 10 September 2021.
