Live is a concert album by Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, a double set drawn from shows in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, England and Japan between 2009 and 2011. It came after three studio albums for the label, Stoa, Holon and Llyrìa, and carries the band's modular groove music of interlocking rhythms onto the stage. It also closes a chapter: these are the last Ronin recordings with Björn Meyer as bassist.
Bärtsch plays piano and Fender Rhodes, Sha bass clarinets and alto saxophone, and Meyer bass guitar. Kaspar Rast is on drums, alongside the band's percussionist, who also recorded the concerts from the stage. His successor Thomy Jordi plays on the final track. The band picked the pieces from more than fifty concerts, at festivals such as Enjoy Jazz, the Leipziger Jazztage and Jazz Baltica and at venues in Amsterdam, Gateshead, Vienna and Lörrach. Bärtsch and Manfred Eicher mixed them at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines, and Eicher produced the album.
The titles keep the band's system of numbered "Moduls", here tagged with the city where each was played. Bärtsch notes that most pieces had three or four years of development on stage, and their flow and length changed with them. Modul 22, recorded in Amsterdam, was played at a Minimal Music festival, and its gradual shifts recall Minimalist process music. Modul 17, from Tokyo, is driven by Rast's brushes. Modul 55, from Salzau, gives Jordi a melodic part in a nocturnal piece of ebb and flow.
Bärtsch saw the album partly as a tribute to Meyer's ten years with the group. Reviewing it in 2012 for The Ear, Jason Kennedy found the first disc "relatively calm and introspective yet expansive acoustically". He noted that "the bass in particular is glorious" and called the set a grower. For Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews, writing in 2014, the Amsterdam take of Modul 22 turns a delicate syncopation into a "glass-blown groove", with bass clarinet pops tipping it off balance.
This is the double CD on ECM Records, ECM 2302/03, released in September 2012, with a 24-page booklet of notes by Bärtsch in German and English.
