ECM Records Jakob Bro, Thomas Morgan, Joey Baron: Streams

2016

Jakob Bro - chitara
Thomas Morgan - contrabas
Joey Baron - tobe

Danish guitarist Jakob Bro creates magical music, impossible to categorize or capture. The songs on ‘Streams’ are best described as jewels revolving in mid-air, reflecting and refracting light. […] The beauty of ‘Streams’ is in its unknowingness, its sense of wonder and possibility.
Ken Micallef, Downbeat

His second recording for Manfred Eicher’s ECM label is another trio recording, again with the hugely impressive Thomas Morgan on bass and, this time, Joey Baron replacing Jon Christensen on drums. It’s an inspired substitution, with Baron’s rare combination of invention and restraint – reminiscent of Paul Motian, to whom the album’s third track is dedicated – providing the perfect underpinning to Bro’s plangent, echoing lines. Mournful, beautiful, dark yet luminous music for Beckett fans.
Cormac Larkin, Irish Times


For all the guitarist’s fondness for understatedly conversational north European jazz-making, this trio is a highly melodic and unpredictably dramatic outfit. The gently weaving ‘Heroines’ is as open as a pop ballad in its ringing guitar line, solicitously escorted by Thomas Morgan’s supple bass and Baron’s patterings and cymbal tingles (Bro repeats it later as an unaccompanied solo). And the Paul Motian dedication ‘PM Dream’ – a collective-improv adventure initiated by Motian admirer Baron – grippingly begins in palpitating long tones, bass urgings and snare-drum twitches before becoming metallic, electronic and intense. […] This is far from guitar-hero music, but it’s full of laid-back character.
John Fordham, The Guardian