Universal Syncopations

Miroslav Vitous, the great bassist and Weather Report founding member, returns with an extraordinary cast of old friends, musicians who have changed the course of jazz, in an album at once timeless and contemporary. When Vitous and producer Manfred Eicher first began discussing this project - Miroslav’s first ECM recording in a decade - one of the conceptual models was the bassist's’s very first leader date, 1969’s “Infinite Search”. That historic landmark, produced by the late Herbie Mann for his Atlantic-distributed Embryo label, featured Vitous, John McLaughlin and Jack DeJohnette - alongside Joe Henderson and Herbie Hancock - and was long regarded, especially by musicians, as one of the crucial documents of the era. "Universal Syncopations" embodies the spirit of that time without being in any sense nostalgic. The new disc seems to make an ellipsis, continuing where "Infinite Search" left off, picking up the story. The central characters are now mature musicians, yet the purity of the playing remains its most striking characteristic. It retains, thanks to Vitous's compositions and concept, the freshness of discovery. This is the quality that links the album to an era when music was the only “agenda”, before the speculative dawn of so-called fusion music, to a time when the protagonists were all still in the process of finding their voices. .

There are numerous musical-historical interconnections between the players, all of whom were active in exploring many shades of progressive jazz at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. For instance: Miroslav Vitous, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin and Jack DeJohnette all played on Wayne Shorter’s epochal “Super Nova”, a session that led to Vitous’s presence in the earliest and, by common critical consensus, most creative edition of Weather Report. Vitous and Corea, still earlier, formed a superlative trio with Roy Haynes whose discography, launched with “Now He Sings, Now He Sobs” in 1968, was continued on ECM Recordings in the 1980s ("Trio Music", and "Trio Music Live In Europe"). DeJohnette, McLaughlin and Corea all played with Miles Davis simultaneously, and Vitous also had his fleeting experiences with Miles. Miroslav and Jack, partners on many sessions, played in trio with Terje Rypdal ("Terje Rypdal/Miroslav Vitous/Jack DeJohnnete" and "To Be Continued"). Jan Garbarek and John McLaughlin met for the first time on Zakir Hussain’s “Making Music”. And, of course, Garbarek and Vitous interacted persuasively on “Star” and “Atmos”, ECM albums of the early 90s, and toured together with Peter Erskine. Back then, Miroslav attributed their compatibility to a shared "Slavic soulfulness" - Vitous is Czech, and the Norwegian-born Garbarek is half-Polish - , a way of hearing melody influenced by shared folk roots, but that can only be part of the story. Garbarek frequently soars in collaborations where, relieved of structural concerns, his sole responsibility is to play with that songbird lyricism that's exclusively his. This is true of Jarrett's "Belonging", the “Officium” alliance with the Hilliard Ensemble, Shankar's "Song For Everyone" and Gary Peacock’s “Voice From The Past – Paradigm” (with DeJohnette and Tomasz Stanko), just some of the contexts to which Garbarek has responded with delightful soloistic invention. The work with Miroslav returns him, fairly unambiguously, to jazz, albeit a "universal" jazz, shaped by European and American perspectives. It is enlightening to hear him playing Vitous's rolling "Tramp Blues" or shaping free melodies with an Ornette-like buoyancy on "Bamboo Forest".

Chick Corea, not unlike Miroslav himself, has been a chameleonic player over the years, trying on and discarding a range of musical personalities. The nature of the work with Vitous on "Universal Syncopations" naturally carries echoes of their association in the aforementioned trio with Haynes, but Corea is also adept at providing impulses to the other soloists, and his angular, jabbing rhythm playing recalls the time when he pushed Miles to new ideas, on sessions such as "Filles de Kilimanjaro" and "In A Silent Way".

It was Miroslav Vitous who introduced his countryman Jan Hammer to John McLaughlin, helping, indirectly, to launch the guitarist's Mahavishnu Orchestra, but the McLaughlin heard on "Universal Syncopations" has perhaps more in common with the pre-Mahavisnu player – with flashes of the focussed, exciting improviser of "Extrapolation" (with John Surman and Tony Oxley), and “Emergency” and “Turn It Over” (with Tony Williams’ Lifetime).

Miroslav played on Jack DeJohnette's first album under his own name, "The DeJohnette Complex", vintage 1969. Back then, as now, DeJohnette's drumming was already distinguished by its resourcefulness. There is nothing else in jazz like DeJohnette's elastic beat.

If the settings that Miroslav Vitous has shaped for his colleagues on "Universal Syncopations" - compositions both wide-open and subtle - cast each of them in a new light as old associations are reinvestigated from today's viewpoint, they also provide a superb showcase for the bassist himself. Long one of the truly outstanding bassists in jazz, his command of the instrument is complete. Perhaps more than any jazz bassist since Scott La Faro, he is a musician who has as much to contribute to the “frontline” of an ensemble as to any conventional notion of rhythm section functions, which he also handles authoritatively. He plays the foreground as much as the background - majestically.