There are albums that define a career and others that distill a musical philosophy into 40-something minutes of tape. In Pas(s)ing belongs firmly in the second category for Mick Goodrick, the guitarist once described by Downbeat as “technically among the finest players around.” Recorded in November 1978 at Oslo’s Talent Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher, it stands as his only leader date for ECM, yet it encapsulates the paradox at the heart of his art: a player of formidable technique who chooses to move like a shadow, shaping the music from within rather than asserting himself from above.
What emerges is a portrait of a “guitar whisperer,” to borrow Fred Hersch’s phrase, quietly reconfiguring what it means to lead a band. Goodrick’s touch is cool yet songful, a singing amplified tone that never crowds the stereo field, preferring glancing lines, luminous voicings and patiently unfurled counterpoint. The tunes themselves avoid grand statements, often seeming to “pirouette gracefully on the spot,” as Melody Maker put it, but this apparent stillness is deceptive: within these circular forms, the band explores subtle shifts of harmony, timbre and pulse, creating a sense of motion that feels more like weather than locomotion.
Crucial to this effect is the company he keeps. John Surman, predominantly on baritone saxophone, brings a burnished, vocal presence that meshes with Goodrick’s guitar in airy, almost choral harmonies. Their exchanges feel less like solos passed back and forth and more like a shared line being refracted through two very different instruments. Beneath them, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette provide what has been aptly described as “supernaturally discreet” momentum: the bass singing, dancing and darting in the spaces between phrases, the drums murmuring and splashing in broken time, always propulsive but never intrusive. Their contribution underlines how a rhythm section can drive a band while barely raising its voice.
Stylistically, In Pas(s)ing sits in that distinct ECM borderland where post-bop vocabulary, chamber music clarity and open-form improvisation bleed into one another. Melody is paramount, but it is often half-lit, as if overheard rather than announced; structures are clear enough to orient the listener yet loose enough to encourage spontaneous reshaping. Goodrick seems intent on finding a “best blend of traditional virtues with a modern conception,” as his contemporaries observed, folding the lineage of jazz guitar into a European-tinged sound world that values resonance, space and the play of overtones as much as it does lines and changes. The result is an album that feels both of its time and strangely outside of it - “fashionably unpushy,” perhaps, but marked everywhere by a quiet authority.
Decades later, musicians like John Scofield still cite In Pas(s)ing as a “special piece of work which fully holds up to today’s listeners,” and it’s not hard to hear why. The record offers a masterclass in how understatement can become its own kind of force, how a leader can shape a session by listening more than by declaring. For listeners, it offers the pleasure of returning again and again to music that seems modest on first contact, only to reveal, over repeated visits, a dense weave of interaction, detail and melodic afterimage. In an era crowded with virtuosity worn on the sleeve, In Pas(s)ing continues to suggest another way: one where the deepest statements arrive in lowercase.
