Winter Songs is Steve Swallow's first album as a leader since Into the Woodwork (2013), and his first appearance on ECM since Swallow Tales and Life Goes On in 2020. The bassist wrote its nine short pieces, titled simply One to Nine, in the months after the death of Carla Bley, his partner in music and life, in late 2023. The result is calm, melodic sextet music, closer to reflection than to display.
Swallow gathered close friends of many years. Chris Cheek on tenor saxophone and Mike Rodriguez on trumpet carry most of the melodies. Gil Goldstein on piano and Steve Cardenas on guitar shape the harmony, and the drums keep the time flexible. Swallow plays his electric bass with a pick, on a five-string instrument with an extra high string, and keeps mostly to the background. The album was recorded in September 2024 at Sear Sound in New York, with Tyler McDiarmid as engineer. Swallow describes the change it brought: "before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed."
Several reviewers heard echoes of late-1950s hard bop in the writing, played with a chamber-like sense of space. One opens with piano and guitar picking out the melody before Rodriguez enters with a slightly melancholy trumpet line. Six is the most hard-swinging piece, its horns stating the theme and taking short solos. Nine, the closing ballad, is almost whispered: Cardenas and Goldstein trade lyrical phrases before Rodriguez solos. Swallow gives himself a brief solo in only one of the nine tracks.
Several critics heard the album as a work of mourning among friends. In The Times, Chris Pearson gave it five stars and called the pieces "warmly swinging, atmospheric gems". DownBeat made it an Editor's Pick, and Frank Alkyer heard musicians playing "for their own souls and sanity as much as for an audience". The sextet's members have long histories with Swallow, whose six decades in jazz run from the Jimmy Giuffre 3 and Gary Burton to his years in Bley's bands.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2879, released on 26 June 2026. The cover photograph is by Luciano Rossetti.
