Returnings is the third ECM album by the Danish guitarist Jakob Bro. Here he and bassist Thomas Morgan meet two veterans of Scandinavian jazz, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and drummer Jon Christensen. The quartet plays slow, open music in which the pulse is rarely stated and the four voices are given room. Bro played trumpet as a child and had long admired Mikkelborg, a fellow Copenhagen resident, so the meeting was also a return to an early source.
The four first played together at two concerts in 2014. Bro and Mikkelborg then met regularly to develop the material with producer Manfred Eicher. The album was recorded in July 2016 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, engineered by Peer Espen Ursfjord and mixed by Jan Erik Kongshaug. Mikkelborg plays trumpet and flugelhorn. ECM notes that it was his first ECM date with Christensen since Terje Rypdal's Vossabrygg, recorded in 2003. Morgan and Christensen had already been Bro's trio on Gefion, his ECM debut as a leader.
Bro wrote most of the eight pieces, Mikkelborg contributed View and Youth, and the two wrote the title track together. Returnings is the record's most intense moment: Mikkelborg's motif is built on the letters E-C-M and on Eicher's name, Christensen plays his toms freely and Bro uses distortion and other pedals. View opens as a long duo for bass and drums, and the theme arrives with trumpet and guitar only after the halfway point. Song for Nicolai remembers the Danish bassist Nicolai Munch-Hansen, who had died the year before, while Oktober and Lyskaster pick up threads from Gefion.
The album was widely reviewed. On AllMusic, Matt Collar wrote that Bro "plays jazz as if in a dream", and he heard in many of the songs a directness that recalls Bill Frisell. In Australia, John Shand gave it nine out of ten in July 2018 and called it "an album of rare beauty". ECM itself relates the sound to earlier label records such as Rypdal's Waves and Descendre. In Jazzwise, Kevin Le Gendre found Bro more introspective and at times mournful here than on earlier occasions, with stillness and quiet playing at a premium.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2546, released on 23 March 2018.
