High Lines brought violinist Michael Galasso back to ECM more than twenty years after his solo album Scenes. He was known above all for his music for Robert Wilson's stage works and for films such as Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love. Here he leads a quartet with Terje Rypdal on electric guitar. Its sixteen mostly short pieces move between baroque figures, Middle Eastern modes, blues and rock.
Galasso was born into a musical family in Louisiana and made his debut at eleven as soloist with the New Orleans Philharmonic. He moved to Europe in 1972, began his long work with Wilson, and in the 1970s studied music in Iran. The album was recorded in November 2002 and April 2004 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Manfred Eicher producing and Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer. Eicher brought Rypdal to the session. Galasso came with two long-standing associates, bassist Marc Marder and percussionist Frank Colón.
A few pieces rework music Galasso wrote for Babak Payami's film Secret Ballot and for Wilson's 2002 staging of The Cabinet of Doktor Caligari. Chaconne carries a figure over from Scenes and turns it in rocking arpeggios. Iranian Dream layers Galasso's own multi-tracked violins. Rypdal often stays in the background as a melodic voice, then cuts loose on Spheric and Fog and After. In the closing Gorge Green his solo is turned inside out, as Kenny Mathieson noted in Jazzwise. No track lasts much more than six minutes, and several are under two.
Mathieson heard music "wide-ranging in style and mood, from peaceful and reflective through to edgy and raucous", and found that it still held together as a whole. The Independent on Sunday imagined a seventeenth-century fiddler in a Norwegian church by the sea, joined by a local guitarist with an amplifier. Its conclusion: "Their music is all texture, harmony and ghosts." In Jazzthing, Reinhard Köchl praised a violin that impresses without needing to dazzle, its strength coming from swaying, repetitive figures.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1713, first released in March 2005, with liner notes by Steve Lake.
