Suspended Night is the second ECM album by Tomasz Stańko with his young Polish quartet, following Soul of Things from 2002. Like its predecessor it is built as a cycle, most of it a series of ten Suspended Variations. This time the band improvises more, and every player takes more room and more risks.
The trumpeter had worked with pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Sławomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michał Miśkiewicz in Poland since the mid-1990s. They were more than thirty years younger than him, and two years of touring in Europe and America had tightened their understanding. The album was recorded in July 2003 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. The cover is a still from Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma.
All the music is by Stańko except the eighth and tenth variations, credited to all four players. After the opening Song for Sarah, the variations move between rubato and quietly swinging passages, and the numbered titles make the album feel like one long suite. Stańko's tone is bony and warm at once, sharp at the top and breathy lower down. He often solos briefly and then hands the space over, as Miles Davis did. Wasilewski sets the pace from across the keyboard, in close dialogue with Kurkiewicz, while Miśkiewicz colours the music with small, exact touches.
In The Guardian, John L. Walters heard nearly seventy minutes of music that was "not pretty, and neither saccharine nor sentimental", just beautiful jazz. Stuart Nicholson in The Observer Music Monthly wrote of four original voices "whose private exchanges of deep musical secrets are darkly moving and profoundly uplifting". Hugh Gregory of Jazz Review, which made it an Editor's Choice, noted that the balance had shifted from structure towards improvisation since Soul of Things, and called the album essential. Stereoplay named it CD of the month, and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung singled out Wasilewski's growth from sensitive accompanist to improviser in his own right. In 2005 the three younger players released their own ECM album, Trio.
CD, ECM 1868, first released on 2 February 2004, with a running time of just over 69 minutes.
