ECM Records Barre Phillips: End To End

2018

Barre Phillips - contrabas

Barre Phillips was the first musician to record an album of solo double bass, back in 1968, and he has always been an absolute master of the solo idiom. In March 2017, Barre recorded what he says will be his last solo album, the final chapter of his “Journal Violone”: it is a beautiful and moving musical statement. All the qualities we associate with Barre’s playing are here in abundance – questing adventurousness, melodic invention, textural richness, developmental logic, and deep soulfulness. End to End was recorded at Studios-La-Buissonne in the south of France, and produced by Manfred Eicher. It is issued in both CD and LP formats.

End to End is a solo bass album by one of the great pioneers of the idiom. Over the last fifty years Barre Phillips, California-born but long a resident of France, has periodically issued solo recordings, considering them the musical equivalent of diary entries (the first one, in 1968, was called Journal violone), updates on his ever-evolving relationship to his chosen instrument. This one, he says, will be the last of his albums in this format, so it is of special interest to those who have followed the story so far and, indeed, to anyone wishing to hear a masterful improviser at work, refocussing lessons learned in the course of a long, creative life. “It’s the end of a cycle,” says Barre, now 83, of the present recording. “Not a summing up, but the last pages of a journal that began fifty years ago.”

The role of the bass and its emancipation as solo instrument has been a recurring theme at ECM through the decades with examples ranging from Dave Holland’s Emerald Tears, Gary Peacock’s December Poems and Miroslav Vitous’s Emergence to Eberhard Weber’s Résumé and Björn Meyer’s Provenance. More bass music is coming in the month’s ahead with compositions by Stefano Scodanibbio played by Daniele Roccato and the Ludus Gravis Ensemble. In early 2019, ECM will issue The Gleaners, a solo bass album by Larry Grenadier.

Scenes from the recording of End to End form part of the newly completed documentary about Barre Phillips, The Workman, by Sam Harfouche. It’s the second film to be made about the bassist’s life, following on from Accompanied Barre: A Portrait of Barre Phillips, by Ariel Pintor (2002).
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