Lathe of Heaven is the first ECM album led by the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, and his first record under his own name since Dharma Days in 2001. He leads a quartet without piano or guitar, so the two horns carry the harmony between them. Turner plays across the full range of the tenor, including its highest register. The title comes from Ursula K. Le Guin's 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven, whose dreamlike, unsettling calm the music shares.
Before this album Turner had been heard on ECM in the cooperative trio Fly, with Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard, and on records by Billy Hart, Enrico Rava and Stefano Bollani. His partner in the front line is the Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen, with Joe Martin on double bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. Cohen, who works without a chordal instrument in his own trio Triveni, matches Turner's long lines step for step. The quartet recorded in June 2013 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber engineering. Manfred Eicher produced, and the album was mixed in January 2014 by Farber, Eicher and Turner.
All six pieces are Turner's. The horns state long, interlocking themes in unison or close counterpoint, then open into solos over a rhythm section that pushes rather than accompanies. Year of the Rabbit, over twelve minutes long, builds its modal harmonies around Gilmore's restless snare and cymbals. Ethan's Line is named for the pianist Ethan Iverson, a close collaborator of Turner's. Sonnet for Stevie is a slow blues study inspired by a song of Stevie Wonder. It gives Cohen one of his finest solos on the record. Brother Sister closes the album as a sparse, rubato coda driven by Martin's bass.
The album drew some of the strongest notices of Turner's career. Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times: "It's his best record. It has a group sound, the force of embodied unity." In The Guardian John Fordham heard tunes in the spirit of Birth of the Cool "floated over a 21st-century rhythmic concept". Several critics compared the two-horn polyphony to Ornette Coleman's pianoless groups. Others recalled the West Coast quartets of the 1950s.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2357, first released on 5 September 2014.
