CD version. Human is the second ECM album as leader by the Israeli pianist Shai Maestro, and the one on which his trio becomes a quartet. After The Dream Thief (2018), recorded with bass and drums, he adds the American trumpeter Philip Dizack. "Philip's trumpet playing sounds to me like a human voice speaking to you," Maestro says. The programme has ten of his originals and one standard, Duke Ellington's In a Sentimental Mood.

The trio is Maestro with the Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder and the Israeli drummer Ofri Nehemya, a group that had already toured and recorded together. Dizack grew up in Milwaukee, won the Carmine Caruso International Trumpet Competition in 2005, reached the semi-finals of the Thelonious Monk competition in 2007 and built his career as a sideman on the road and in the studio. He met Maestro in New York, where both worked in other people's bands. Maestro had earlier spent five years as pianist with Avishai Cohen. The album was recorded in early 2020 at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, engineered by Gérard de Haro and produced by Manfred Eicher.

The brief opener Time sets floating piano and hesitant trumpet over cymbal wash and bowed bass. On GG piano and trumpet race through long, fast unison lines that sound fully written. Hank and Charlie, a tribute to Hank Jones and Charlie Haden, whom Maestro calls his heroes, is a feature for piano and bass, and Prayer is a low-key piece for the trio alone. For the Ellington piece he took the 1963 recording by Ellington and John Coltrane as a reference, and the album closes with Ima, dedicated to his mother Talma.

In Jazzwise, John Fordham described Dizack as "a key figure on this session" and expected the 2021 polls to recognise the record. Gary Fukushima in DownBeat heard the title track as "a chorale that ebbs and flows with poignancy", in contrast with the density of GG. Jon Turney, in London Jazz News in February 2021, called the Ellington a "divertingly clattery rendition", and the German magazine Audio made the album its jazz CD of the month.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2688, first released on 29 January 2021.