On Within a Song the guitarist John Abercrombie looks back at the jazz of the 1960s that shaped his ears. His points of reference are records by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Jim Hall that he heard as a young man. It is a homage to an era rather than to one artist. With Joe Lovano on tenor saxophone, the quartet treats those pieces as material for new playing, and Abercrombie adds three compositions of his own.

The idea grew out of talks with producer Manfred Eicher about an album dedicated to a single jazz artist or composer. In the end Abercrombie chose the period, and the post-bop records by players who were stretching the forms. The group was put together for this project, with Drew Gress on double bass and Joey Baron on drums. Abercrombie and Lovano had already recorded together on ECM for Open Land in 1998, and had played in a quartet with Steve Swallow and John Riley. The album was recorded in September 2011 at Avatar Studios in New York, with James Farber as engineer, and Abercrombie wrote the liner notes.

The opening Where Are You and Without a Song come from Rollins's The Bridge, the record with Jim Hall that Abercrombie calls an epiphany. Here the second is folded into his own title piece. Abercrombie first heard Kind of Blue in 1962 as a student in Boston, and on Flamenco Sketches the band builds new melodies over the familiar progression. Ornette Coleman's Blues Connotation, from This Is Our Music, takes the freer of the two paths the tune allows. Coltrane's Wise One, Evans's Interplay and Sergio Mihanovich's Sometime Ago, a staple of the Art Farmer quartet with Hall, complete the set.

In The Guardian, John Fordham found the atmosphere delicate ("Baron at times seems barely to be touching his cymbals") but heard more exuberant swing than on recent Abercrombie sessions. Writing for London Jazz News in May 2012, Chris Parker praised the leader's "quiet virtuosity, musicianly intensity and faultless dynamic and textural control". Among the originals, the waltz Easy Reader nods to the 1960s film Easy Rider.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2254, first released in April 2012.