AAJ Review: Jakob Bro, Gefion

[jkelman]

My review of Jakob Bro's Gefion, today at All About Jazz.

It's been a long time coming. Jakob Bro made his first ECM appearance as a member of drummer Paul Motian's twin-sax/triple-guitar band on the late drummer's Garden of Eden (2006). Three more years passed before he returned, this time as a member of Tomasz Stańko's trans-European quintet on 2009's Dark Eyes--a group that evolved considerably from its early performance at Norway's 2009 Molde International Jazz Festival to a far more confident showing a year later at the TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival.

And so, perhaps, it's not that unusual that it should take another six years for Bro to make his third appearance on the label, but this time as a leader. Gefion is a definitive sampling of the Danish guitarist's reserved approach to music-making, in this case with a positively empathic trio including one ECM legend in drummer Jon Christensen, who has appeared on well over sixty recordings for the label; and one younger player in bassist Thomas Morgan--who has, since his 2006 label debut on John Abercrombie's Wait Till You See Her, gone on to appear on another five dates with artists ranging from Craig Taborn and Masabumi Kikuchi to Giovanni Guidi, David Virelles...and Stańko.

That Stańko is a common factor amongst these three musicians--Christensen playing with the trumpeter on his career-defining Litania-The Music of Krzysztof Komeda (1997) and, the following year, the equally impressive From The Green Hill, while Morgan was a member of the trumpeter's stellar New York Quartet heard on 2013's Wislawa--is nothing more than a happy coincidence, though the fact that all three spent time with Stańko speaks to the Polish trumpeter's good taste...and the three musicians' inimitable abilities.

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