The Bell is the first album drummer and percussionist Ches Smith made as a leader for ECM, a trio with pianist Craig Taborn and violist Mat Maneri. Smith wrote all eight pieces, which run from five to thirteen minutes, as chamber music for improvisers. The scores are taut, but they leave wide room for the three players, and the album gradually builds in intensity from its quiet opening chimes.
The trio first played at the New York Winter Jazzfest in 2014, where critic Peter Margasak called its set "the best thing I caught all weekend". The group then became a priority for all three, and in June 2015 they recorded the album at Avatar Studios in New York. Manfred Eicher produced and James Farber engineered. Smith had appeared on ECM before with Tim Berne's Snakeoil and with Robin Williamson. He studied composition with Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran, and here he plays drums, vibraphone and timpani.
The nine-minute title track opens with a bell chime over vibraphone. Taborn's chords come and go beneath Maneri's rising viola lines, and the piece ends in a heated passage of percussion. Barely Intervallic starts lyrically and centres on Maneri, whose viola the others frame with sparse textures before the piece grows into collective improvisation. On I'll See You On The Dark Side Of The Earth the focus narrows to Taborn's piano, with viola and drums reduced to a minimum. In Wacken Open Air syncopated snare hits run under a line played by piano and viola together, and the closing For Days drifts into introspection without returning to its theme.
In The New York Times, Ben Ratliff called it "an excitingly slippery album" that seems to be delicate chamber music, then slides into "trenchantly rhythmic, improvised music". Will Layman of PopMatters wrote in January 2016 that Smith sounds like "an atmospheric percussionist" rather than a conventional drummer. The Guardian, for its part, found the balance of compositional tautness and spontaneity so unusual that it could not be filed under jazz, improv or contemporary classical music.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2474, first released on 15 January 2016.
