Jazz
ECM Records (ECM 2859) · 21 August 2026
Of the nine tracks on Windflower, eight were improvised in the room. The other one, “La Source”, is the only one Ayumi Tanaka brought in written, and you can tell at once: a melody unfolds slowly and the three of them pass it around, each adding a remark, while Thomas Strønen’s brushes hold the three of them together without marking a single bar.
Manfred Eicher produced the session at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in May 2025, and the production does exactly the job it’s asked to do: let you hear the air in the room. Strønen barely touches a drum head, working instead with cymbals, brushes and mallets, and much of what he plays registers as colour before it registers as rhythm. Thomas Morgan gives the bass lines that walk alongside the piano rather than propping it up from underneath.
The two shortest pieces explain the method best. “The Sea Is Still” runs two and a half minutes, Strønen opening and closing a wash of cymbals while Tanaka digs around beneath it in the left hand. And “The Dissolving Sun” (2:41) closes the album by reducing everything to essentials: one piano note, a brushed cymbal, a low note on the bass.
Across forty minutes the record never raises its voice. That is the proposition, and it’s played with a discipline that never slips, but the cost shows on a second listen: when everything is entrusted to texture, the one piece carrying written material ends up being the one you remember. “La Source” has something to hold on to and the other eight have to generate it afresh every time. Several manage it; “Weaving” and “Driftwood” stall halfway.
Nine tracks, forty minutes, ECM 2859, out since 21 August. It’s this trio’s first record; ECM had already released Tanaka’s Subaqueous Silence in 2021.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents