ECM Records EBERHARD WEBER - LATER THAT EVENING CD

For a musician who seems to have such emotional and artistic control over his music, Eberhard Weber's recordings come across relatively ego-less. Rather, he derives identity from a group sound, a fleeting snapshot of a collection of musicians confronting his material in a spontaneously unified manner. Certainly, he allows his players generous opportunities for solo expression: with Colours, Weber's touring band, we’d seen the emergence of two very influential improvisers in the modern genre, keyboard virtuoso Rainer Brüninghaus and reed wizard Charlie Mariano. But the sound and presence of Weber's group, live or on record is what immediately strikes the senses.

On Later That Evening the instrumentation Weber has chosen may appear to be fairly straight forward, but there is a stunning orchestral quality to these performances. In keeping with his own group concept, there are very few solos in the traditional sense. Instead, there are fragments of improvisation hidden within layers of harmonic direction created by Weber, Frisell and parti­cularly Mays. The effect is not unlike various sections of an orchestra that appear and disappear before we're able to clearly discern timbre and sonority.