Folly Seeing All This is a chamber work album by the trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler, built around the Balanescu Quartet. Its title comes from a line of What Is The Word, the last poem Samuel Beckett wrote before his death in 1989, and the disc closes with Mantler's setting of it. According to ECM's own retrospective of his work, this was the record on which he began exploring the string quartet, the core of what later became his Chamber Music and Songs Ensemble.
Mantler, born in 1943, studied trumpet and musicology in Vienna and moved to Boston in 1962. He founded the Jazz Composer's Orchestra with Carla Bley, and later the WATT label, through which he began bringing voices from outside jazz into his music. Here the quartet, led by the violinist Alexander Balanescu, is joined by Mantler's trumpet, Rick Fenn on guitar, Wolfgang Puschnig on alto flute, Karen Mantler on piano and voice, with vibraphone and chimes adding colour. The album was recorded in June 1992 at Angel Studios in London, mixed in Copenhagen, and produced by Mantler himself for ECM.
The title piece runs almost half an hour. Balanescu's violin, with its unmistakable vibrato, leads into a sequence of shifting moods in which the trumpet rises over the strings and the guitar draws long, thin lines above the piano. News, about eleven minutes, is lighter and more open, with Puschnig's alto flute set against a knotty background and the guitar growing more insistent. In What Is The Word the strings circle slowly while Karen Mantler and Jack Bruce, the former singer and bassist of Cream, sing Beckett's words. Bruce had worked with Mantler on Beckett before, on No Answer, recorded in 1973 and based on How It Is.
Writing on ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo found that in Mantler's music "every instrument, every voice, rings with an equal truth". He called the album "one of his most reflective albums to date" and recommended it, with the anthology Review, as a way into Mantler's work.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1485 (517 363-2), first released in March 1993.
