The Distance is the first big-band recording led by the bassist and composer Michael Formanek, written for the 18-piece group he calls Ensemble Kolossus. After two ECM albums with his quartet, he turned to a large orchestra made of some of the most individual players in New York. Most of the disc is taken by Exoskeleton, an eight-part suite that moves between written ensemble passages and long stretches built around soloists.
The quartet records were The Rub and Spare Change (2010) and Small Places (2012), and their saxophonist Tim Berne returns here on baritone. The band also includes Ralph Alessi on trumpet, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Kris Davis on piano. Around them are five reeds, four trumpets and cornet, four trombones, marimba and drums. Formanek wrote for particular soloists, in the Ellington manner, as much as for sections. The bassist Mark Helias conducts. The album was recorded in December 2014 at Systems Two in Brooklyn by Jon Rosenberg, and mixed by David Torn, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.
The short title track opens the record as a slow tone poem of horn-section breaths and close harmonies. Exoskeleton takes its frame from biology, a hard outer shell that the music works its way through towards the heart. Its first part, Impenetrable, begins with dramatic ensemble writing before an alto saxophone solo turns it towards downtown New York. In Beneath the Shell the woodwinds sit in both deep and high registers and a walking bass emerges. The closing Metamorphic ends in a frenetic exchange between Formanek's bass and the trumpet of Dave Ballou.
The reviews were strong. In The Guardian, John Fordham heard glimpses of the Birth of the Cool band and of Charles Mingus, and called it "a visionary big-band project". DownBeat gave five stars, and in JazzTimes John Murph wrote that the suite "has the makings of a 21st-century classic". In The Observer, Dave Gelly found the music unsettling in its difference, and gripping for the parade of soloists the ensemble sets off. Henning Bolte in London Jazz News remarked that it may be the most trombone-heavy album ECM has released.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2484, released on 12 February 2016.
