Tuesday, November 24, 2015

CD REVIEW: Eberhard Weber - Hommage à Eberhard Weber


Eberhard Weber - Hommage à Eberhard Weber
(ECM Records 473 2344. CD Review by Adrian Pallant) 

Rarely has a live jazz album felt as emotive or as broadly momentous, encompassing and celebrating so many strands and decades of sublime creativity. 

Since the beginning of the 1970s, and gradually becoming a mainstay of Manfred Eicher's ECM record label, Stuttgart-born Eberhard Weber has forged a visionary compositional and instrumental path, providing contemporary jazz with one of its most distinctive, five-string bass sonorities. Throughout his career, Weber has continued to delight audiophiles and concert audiences via a vast range of atmospheric, boundary-straddling releases, collaborating perhaps most notably with Ralph Towner, Jon Christensen, Jan Garbarek, Gary Burton, Paul McCandless and Pat Metheny. But in 2007, a stroke brought an end to his bass-playing (though two albums, Resumé (2012) and Encore (2015) – based on archived, live bass solos with the Jan Garbarek Group between 1990 and 2007 – have since been released).

In January 2015, to observe the popular bassist's 75th birthday and honour his significant musical achievements, two jubilee concerts were presented in Stuttgart; and though Eberhard selected the personnel, he requested that the programme be a surprise. So, a stellar line-up convened – Pat Metheny (guitars), Jan Garbarek(soprano sax), Gary Burton (vibraphone), Scott Colley (double bass), Danny Gottlieb (drums), Paul McCandless (English horn, soprano sax), Klaus Graf (alto sax) and Ernst Hutter (euphonium).  With the powerfully elegant 18-piece SWR Big Band conducted by Helge Sunde and Michael Gibbs, the stage was set for large-scale arrangements of Weber's music (with arrangements by Gibbs, Ralf SchmidRainer Tempel and Libor Šíma), with Pat Metheny's 30-minutes-plus commission, Hommage, the centerpiece.


read more: http://news360.com/digestarticle/OBhivco2J0a4FnS5L5wUXA

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