Once Upon a Time (Live in Avignon) is a solo concert by Eberhard Weber, recorded in August 1994 at the Théâtre des Halles in Avignon and released by ECM in November 2021. A stroke in 2007 ended Weber's playing career, which gives this archive recording of a complete solo set particular weight. It was taped in the middle of a run of solo concerts, and it shows how freely he reworked his own pieces on stage.
Weber plays alone on his five-string electric double bass, using a delay unit to store phrases and recall them as loops, so that he accompanies himself in real time. Jan Garbarek, in whose group Weber played for years, once described him as a musician who just happens to play the bass. Weber himself never cared for the conventional bass solo, preferring to give dynamics, tenderness and silence their place. The concert was part of a double bass festival at the theatre curated by Barre Phillips. Gérard de Haro produced and engineered the recording, and mixed it at Studios La Buissonne in May 2021, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.
Most of the programme comes from Weber's solo albums Orchestra (1988) and Pendulum (1993), including Ready Out There, Silent for a While, Delirium and Air. The opening Pendulum sets the method: melodic bass figures circle and pile up until the delay turns them into an ensemble. Trio for Bassoon and Bass stretches to nearly thirteen minutes, starting from a wistful melody and growing through layered loops and sudden runs. The surprise is My Favorite Things by Rodgers and Hammerstein, a six-minute version that swings and that Weber had never recorded before.
In The Scotsman, Jim Gilchrist gave the album five stars and called Weber "a singular talent playing a singular instrument." Michael Tucker, who had heard many of Weber's solo concerts, wrote in Jazz Journal that it is a "thoroughly captivating example of solo Weber at his inimitable best." Reviewing a Weber solo show in 1994, the Financial Times had already doubted that anyone else could play what he plays. Roger Thomas in BBC Music Magazine noted that the live room gives the music a different space from the studio sound ECM usually provided him.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2699, released in 2021.
