Our Daily Bread, the new album from Joe Lovano’s Trio Tapestry (Lovano, Marilyn Crispell, and Carmen Castaldi), finds the group continuing to extend its spacious and lyrical approach, with deep listening and intense focus.
“Our Daily Bread is fueled by the rhythm spirit of expression that projects the mysterious world of music that lies ahead,” says master saxophonist Joe Lovano in his liner notes, and these elegantly fluid pieces and free-floating ballads indeed feel like songs of the soul.
Marilyn Crispell is the optimal pianist for this music, orchestrating it as it unfolds with a sensibility attuned to both contemporary chamber music and post-Coltrane improvising. Drummer Carmen Castaldi, a Lovano associate since teenage years, embellishes the music with his own poetic touch on cymbals and, like Joe himself, draws blossoming resonances from gongs. Midway through the album, Lovano delivers the bluesy “One For Charlie” as a solo tenor tribute to the late Charlie Haden, investing every note with meaning, as the tune’s dedicatee once did.
“The intensity comes not from ferocity but from depth of feeling,” wrote the BBC Music Magazine of the group’s debut. “Lovano’s themes and harmonies provide rich potential which the trio realises beautifully, exploring texture and mood as fruitfully as it develops melody and harmony.”
Our Daily Bread was produced by Manfred Eicher and recorded at Lugano’s Auditorio Stelio Molo in May, 2022.