My review of Theo Bleckmann's ECM leader debut, Elegy, today at All About Jazz.

While ECM is a label largely renowned for its subtlety, attention to space and detail, and overall understated, "less is more" aesthetic--an early sampler titled, even, The Most Beautiful Sound Next To Silence--it's hard to imagine a label debut as a leader that could be less about virtuosity and more about creating soft atmospheres and ambiences than singer Theo Bleckmann's delicately moving, aptly titled Elegy.

Bleckmann is no newcomer to the label: he was an important guest on pianist Julia Hulsmann's A Clear Midnight--Weill and America (ECM, 2015), and a member of contemporary classical vocalist/pianist/composer Meredith Monk's ensemble for 2002's Mercy (ECM) and evocative 2008 followup, Impermanence (ECM)--two albums also featuring Elegy's drummer (and noted composer), John Hollenbeck.

Despite collaborating with Ben Monder for many years on a regular basis--perhaps at their most impressive on the guitarist's mind-boggling Oceana (Sunnyside, 2005)--it was, perhaps, a surprise that Bleckmann did not appear on Monder's ECM debut as a leader, 2015's Amorphae. Still, there are some connective threads between Amorphae and Elegy. Both are largely dark-hued; even Bleckmann's sole cover on Elegy, Stephen Sondheim's "Comedy Tonight" is taken at an uncharacteristically funereal pace, with pianist Shai Maestro moving seamlessly alongside Bleckmann as the singer delivers Sondheim's lyrics with his characteristically unaffected, clear, direct and vibrato-less voice, combining consonant lyricism with the occasional more angular dissonant injection.

Curiously perhaps, for an album led by a singer, this set of eleven Bleckmann compositions and single Sondheim cover only includes four tunes with lyrics: in addition to "Comedy Tonight," Bleckman's minimal prose for one of the album's most dramatic yet understated pieces, "Fields"; his more elegiac "Take My Life," its death-related lyrics the most overt demonstration of what Elegy is, for the most part, about; and "To Be Shown to Monks at a Certain Temple," where Monder's volume-swelled chords over an electronic cloud act as Bleckmann's support during its hymnal introduction, with rising star (and, with Elegy, his first ECM appearance) Shai Maestro moving forward for something that's less a solo and more a fully interactive engagement with Monder, Hollenbeck and bassist Chris Tordini--another ECM first-timer--as a pulse emerges, throughout which Bleckmann delivers an emotive excerpt from Chiao Jan's The Poetry of Zen.

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