CD version. Up and Coming is the second album by the quartet of guitarist John Abercrombie, after 39 Steps from 2013. With him are pianist Marc Copland, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Joey Baron. It turned out to be his last record. ECM had released his first album as a leader, Timeless, in 1974, and Abercrombie died in August 2017, seven months after this one appeared. The music favours song form and lyrical melody, played with a soft attack and a great deal of mutual listening. In ECM's notes Abercrombie describes his later playing as "more to the point, with melodic lines clearer."
The four musicians go back a long way. Abercrombie and Copland met in Chico Hamilton's band in the early 1970s, when Copland was still playing alto saxophone. Baron first subbed in Abercrombie's band in the late 1970s, and Gress joined him in the quartet that recorded Within a Song in 2012. The sessions took place at Avatar Studios in New York in April and May 2016, with James Farber engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. By then Abercrombie had long given up the pick and struck the strings with his thumb, which explains the warm, rounded sound of the guitar here.
Five pieces are Abercrombie originals and two are by Copland. The opener Joy is slow and gentle, with guitar and piano lines flowing over each other above Baron's cymbals. Gress takes a fine solo on the swinging title tune. Copland's Silver Circle sets up a compact, funky groove while keeping the meditative tone of the rest. The one standard is Miles Davis's Nardis, treated in the spirit of Bill Evans. The band states the theme rubato before settling into an easy, conversational tempo.
Critics read the album as the work of musicians with nothing left to prove. In The Guardian, John Fordham called it "the quintessence of jazz power in reserve", singling out Silver Circle as the best track. Peter Bacon, writing for London Jazz News in January 2017, heard "an understated gem with a subtle glow that shines deep." BBC Music Magazine gave it four stars and pointed to the thumb technique as the source of its warmth.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2528, first released on 13 January 2017.
